At Ad:tech in London today, Twitter product manager Shiva Rajaraman announced a interesting new update to its Promoted Tweets advertising offering. Promoted Tweets, which launched last April, allows advertisers to purchase keywords and select tweets that will appear on top of Twitter Search results for the bought terms. Rajaraman said today that Twitter now allow advertisers to serve Promoted Tweets based on the people and brands Twitter users are following. As noted by the FT, Rajaraman tells the audience: “As we move forward, we are going to implement targeting mechanisms that allow people to engage their audience in that way,” he said. “Right now we are starting with essentially keywords but the basic goal is to build out interests based on who you’re following … As that grows to scale, I think we’ll see a lot of opportunities beyond traditional brand advertising.” We know Twitter considers advertising as one of the pillars of its revenue strategy. And it makes sense for Twitter to start serving more targeted advertising, similar to Facebook. While its existing advertising offerings, which also include Promoted Trends, are seeing traction, there are plenty of other opportunities for the microblogging network to start pulling in more ad dollars. The newly designed Twitter lends itself to advertising opportunities, says Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. While Twitter has yet to pitch the targeted advertising model (it is still being tweaked) to brands and advertisers, I have no doubt that advertisers will be receptive to serving highly targeted ads. One only needs to look at Facebook’s advertising revenue to see the massive potential of serving targeted ads to Twitter’s 145 million registered users. CrunchBase InformationTwitterInformation provided by CrunchBase 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7Authors: Leena Rao