Twitter Passion Networks – How interests shape audiences

5th June 2018

What are Twitter passion networks? Targeting audiences by passions has proven to be a lot more effective than simply relying on demographics. But the approach is not devoid of challenges.

Passion audiences are not monolithic and being into ‘food’ can mean being into ‘fine dining’ as well as ‘food trucks’, ‘healthy eating’, ‘intermittent fasting’, etc. So how do you avoid the dangers of over-simplification? How can you identify the various audiences behind a seemingly unifying passion to produce effective marketing that resonates with the communities it reaches?

We turned to Twitter to show how the social ties of people sharing common passions can help us identify the hidden structure of passion audiences. The study maps out the global audiences of Twitter passion networks in fashion, technology, politics, TV & film, fitness, music, food and sports, and will change the way you look at interest targeting for good.

Twitter passion networks

Twitter is made up of thousands of densely connected passion communities. Truly understanding these networks is the key to finding the right people to target. Pulsar set out to define Twitter audiences by their interests, and randomly sampled and analyzed 800,000 Twitter users globally to understand the demographic traits and interests of eight major passion networks (100,000 from each). The Twitter passion networks consisted of fashion, technology, politics, TV & film, fitness, music, food and sports.

We found that it is impractical to define users by generic terms. User passion networks tend to show lifestyle choices, and cluster around either geographic, ethnic or interest affinities, sometimes a mix of all three: the interest shapes the audience.

Using the following/follower relationship in Twitter’s Social Graph maps these cultural affinities and delivers a granular ready-to-use audience segmentation. This makes it easy to produce relevant marketing and targeting in sync with the moments, the behaviors and the affinities of the audience.

Download the whitepaper now to understand how these networks operate