Political parties contesting for the upcoming elections in UK can now up their game with Twitter’s latest geo-targeted advertising. Postcard targeting allows for campaign targeting on a much more granular level.
The geo-targeting will provide advertisers (or campaigning political parties) accessibility to specific regions, metropolitan areas and postcodes. With this precision, advertisers can customise their pitch in context to the the different areas, in order to connect with and win people over at a local level.
Presently, political parties and enterprises in the UK can target audience by nine different regions and focus Twitter ads to target a variety of metropolitan areas like Birmingham, Liverpool-Manchester, London or Glasgow, according to the Twitter blog post making the announcement.
VentureBeat points out that this isn’t the first instance of region-focused advertising offered by Twitter with brands already being able to target consumers in 30 countries, “like the U.S., Canada, France, Spain, and the U.K.”
The Twitter blogpost highlights three key ways parties can fuse the targeted advertising with other strategies:
- By focusing issues relevant in some constituencies, single issues such as health, education or employment can dominate an election battle. Postcode targeting gives voters the chance to push these issues and ask questions and for candidates to respond.
- Voters in constituencies can know their representatives better and the candidates stand a chance to show who they are and what it is they stand for.
- Political parties have to think at a national level and often act on a local one. Postcode targeting is one way that political parties can do this.
Even with the advent of smart devices, what is still notable is the fact that only a fraction of the U.K. population (23%) are Twitter users. Campaigners will certainly have to rely on other methods as well to reach out to the voting public.
Read the full blogpost here.
(Image credit: UK in Jan 2011 – Twitter sentiment by Robin Hawkes)
