Twitter Adds Weather Data to Its Targeting Arsenal

Thanks to a new partnership with The Weather Company (TWC), Twitter will now enable marketers to leverage weather-based triggers to automatically deliver relevant content to its users.

For example, an ice-cream vendor could promote messages based on TWC’s high temperature forecast, or a sunscreen brand could automatically target promoted tweets to consumers in hot and sunny areas.

“This partnership helps marketers leverage our deep weather insights and extend them on to the social graph,” says Curt Hecht, chief global revenue officer of TWC. “It benefits marketers by helping make their Promoted Tweets more contextually relevant to the Twitter users they are targeting.”

Hecht further tells ClickZ that through this partnership, TWC wants to make weather part of every marketer’s campaigns.

Brands have long capitalized on weather data to market their products and services, but this partnership brings weather data into the social media ecosystem in a new way.

“Using weather data is something that brands and marketers have been doing, but usually on a less-integrated basis,” says Ron Schott, director of professional services at Simply Measured, a provider of social media analytics and measurement.

“What this [partnership] does, though, is bring that kind of data to marketers and agencies who may not have had access to it before, because of costs or simply because of the complexities associated with integrating weather-related data into their [ad] buying decision platforms,” Schott adds.

In addition to offering marketers comprehensive access to weather data, the partnership between TWC and Twitter has other benefits.

Under the agreement, TWC will be the first media partner to tap into Twitter’s application programming interface (API), leveraging its WeatherFX data division to trigger weather-related promoted content.

“This is the first time Twitter is allowing media agencies to buy across the service in an automated fashion through the API,” says Caitlin Partridge, strategy and delivery leader of socialdeviant, a Chicago-based social media agency. “Typically, agencies would need to bring in marketing tech partners such as SocialCode.”

For Twitter’s part, the partnership will help the microblogging service catch up with its competitors in terms of the integration of weather targeting, according to Partridge, who points out that Facebook already started offering weather-triggered targeting to marketers a year ago.

Schott adds that given the fact that Twitter has been working on effective targeting criteria with a focus on mobile, the deal will further power their targeting capability.

“When you’re competing against Facebook, which allows brands and advertisers to target based on an ever-increasing number of data points, Twitter has to think in terms of clever and more-relevant ways to pinpoint consumers,” he tells ClickZ.

But bringing weather data to social media is just the start. Looking forward, social media platforms like Twitter will likely collaborate with more diverse data sources to help marketers deliver tailored content.

“Agencies are already using flight cancellation data to create opportunities for search marketing, why not do the same with Twitter and Facebook?” says Schott. “Eventually, you’ll see the vast amount of data being captured by wearable technology also feeding into the advertising targeting mix.”

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