Betaworks-Backed Scale Model Launches To Help Advertisers Target Twitter Communities

Scale Model, the first company to launch out of betawork’s newest batch of hacker-in-residence projects, is trying to offer advertisers on Twitter a much more targeted experience than they’ve ever had.

The service identifies communities on Twitter (based on interests) and listens to those communities to understand what kind of content they’re sharing and ultimately target them for advertising partners.

Twitter Ads already let you target by keyword, geography, gender, location, etc. But Scale Model actually helps you understand the very best keywords, shareable content, and hashtags of a specific community.

Scale Model understands that people who are interested in tech startups (for example) vary greatly, from tech journalists to entrepreneurs to VCs to college students to developers to designers and well beyond. Scale Model can understand how these different sub-communities tie into one another and see the differences between each sub-communities’ shared content.

This allows brands to connect with a better targeted audience, as well as tap into the broader reach that comes through Scale Model’s understanding of how various communities overlap and what they have in common.

At launch, Scale Model will offer six public community models that any advertiser can tap into and target, through Scale Model’s integration with the Twitter Advertising API. The API integration allows Scale Model to automatically update a campaign’s keyword targeting and follower targeting, or use simple copy-and-paste lists of users and/or keywords.

Those communities include 2016 Elections, Animal Lovers (launching in partnership with The DoDo), Climate Change, Travel, TV Culture and US Politics, but each of those are divided into their own sub-communities. For example, US Politics includes Media, Progressives and Conservatives, whereas Animal Lovers includes sub-communities like Conservation and Dog Lovers.

Betaworks partner and CFO Josh Auerbach explained that building out a specific model can take time, depending on the size or the complexity of the community.

“Small models can take 20 minutes to build,” said Auerbach. “Other models, of more complex or clustered communities, can take several iterations and an elapsed time of a half-day or more. We’re building tooling to speed and simplify model creation, but in every case it requires the combination of data science and human judgment.”

As Scale Model rolls out of the betaworks community and into the public spectrum, the company is still testing its pricing model. However, They did explain to me that customers will pay regular monthly fee per model.

If you want to learn more about Scale Model, you can check out the website here.