Case Study: Affinio and Twitter APIs to define advertising campaigns

Affinio is a company created by Tim Burke and Stephen Hankinson that plans and implements marketing strategies for different brands. Since its inception it has used graphics of interests to understand modern consumers.
2 min reading
23 October 2018
Case Study: Affinio and Twitter APIs to define advertising campaigns
Case Study: Affinio and Twitter APIs to define advertising campaigns

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Affinio is a company created by Tim Burke and Stephen Hankinson that plans and implements marketing strategies for different brands. Since its inception it has used graphics of interests to understand modern consumers.

In 2013, Tim Burke and Stephen Hankinson viewed Twitter as an opportunity to find new customers for their business applications. So they spent a year analyzing data from Twitter graphics (via public APIs) to quickly identify and segment groups. Affinio was thus created, and with it a number of tools: one to analyze Twitter users and another for segmentation.

Burke and Hankinson later realized there was room for their product to offer further possibilities by integrating the Twitter advertising platform.  In fact, they first tested Twitter’s custom segmentation in their own company and that grew their customer base.

What they did was take advantage of some previous work to build a number of guidance tools to meet their customers’ needs. This required leveraging Twitter’s own network, the Gnip platform, adapted audiences, and Twitter’s advertising API.

All these tools permitted them to:

1 – Expand the ‘affinity’ group. Once Affinio discovers niche segments of the followers of a brand, it uses its own algorithm (using the Twitter API and the Gnip search API) to search for matches with that profile in the entire Twitter user base. This increases the user segment to which a brand can direct its Twitter advertising campaign.

2 –Improve their orientation. Affinio uses a custom optimization engine to improve its orientation, thanks to the statistics of the advertising campaign.

3 –Recommend content. It’s able to offer common terms, hashtags, images and content used by a particular segment. These ideas are used to suggest a copy that the user should consider to improve the campaign’s performance, knowing that these will resonate with the target audience.

4 –Create multivariate tests. Affinio uses the Twitter advertising API to create multiple simultaneous campaigns with combinations of creativity and copies oriented to data. In addition, it tracks results in real time for automatic optimization on behalf of clients.

In its early beta cases Affinio’s results were very interesting. In particular, a small B2B software business generated 25% more sales opportunities compared with previous Adword campaigns. Its creators admit that success lies in forming a kind of tribe and from there, to orient everything toward it.

“Our ideas of the tribe and content recommendations give them the ‘secret handshake’ [to the niche you are targeting] to enter their most influential communities to promote trust and a deeper commitment”, explained the managers. All thanks to identifying new business opportunities and also using one of Twitter’s APIs.

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