Twitter to sell highly targeted ads

In this week’s other piece of Twitter related news the social networking giant has been outlining its soon-to-be-updated advertising structure.

The new system, which is currently being tested, will allow advertisers to target users based on the people and brands they follow.

The Financial Times quotes Twitter’s Project Manager, Shiva Rajaraman, as saying at the annual Ad Tech conference in London (@adtech_london) that “With its new targeted ads, Twitter could allow Hewlett-Packard to promote its tweets to people who follow Dell.”

However, he was keen to avoid a Google Buzz-style privacy backlash and stressed to the UK’s Telegraph newspaper that user data would not be visible to advertisers.

While Twitter tries to capitalise on it continuing growth it has been working flat out over the past year to incorporate advertising features into users’ streams.

This announcement marks Twitter’s firm commitment to context heavy advertising and comes as a further threat Google’s AdWords which has already seen focused competition this year with Apple’s acquisition of mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless in January.