SAN FRANCISCO: Brands and advertisers will have a new tool at their disposal when planning their live campaigns, after Twitter announced the launch of a new event targeting feature.

The social network has long been a leading platform for real-time marketing, but now it claims its new three-stage tool will simplify matters for marketers.

Twitter's new feature includes a calendar for highlighting major global events as well as sporting fixtures, holidays, festivals and other significant events in the US, UK, France, Brazil and Japan.

Advertisers will be able to filter the calendar by location, date and type of event so they can align their campaigns to the most suitable events months in advance.

Secondly, an event insights tool will provide audience data from the previous year, helping advertisers to assess what were the most engaging tweets at an event as well giving them access to other metrics, such as audience reach.

The third stage of the process will be event activation, which will help advertisers to create campaigns targeted at chosen events with just one click. Event targeting can be combined with other Twitter targeting features, such as language and gender.

"With event targeting, you can activate around live moments, quickly and easily," said Dinkar Jain, senior product manager at Twitter.

"We'll help you discover and plan for these moments, learn more about the participating audiences through valuable insights, and with one click, create a campaign that delivers the right message to just the right users as the event unfolds."

Ameet Ranadive, Twitter's senior director of revenue products, went on to explain that promoted tweets will be sent only to people who are engaged with a current event.

He told Marketing Land that would enable marketers to reach people at events they possibly missed in previous campaigns.

Meanwhile, users will continue to be protected because the events feature will be subject to Twitter's standard ad targeting rules that limit the number of ads served to a user in a given time.

Data sourced from Twitter; additional content by Warc staff