Retailers are spreading out their holiday marketing spend on Twitter over the entire season and not just going all in on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, J.J. Hirschle, Twitter’s director of retail, tells Internet Retailer.  

“It seems like all of our clients recognize the need to be available at any time to anyone with great offers throughout the holiday season and not laser-focus on those two big days,” he says. “The conversations about holiday shopping started earlier than they used to and we expect them to continue all the way throughout the season.”

The shift in marketers’ behavior is a reflection of the changing ways that retailers are approaching the holidays. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., for example, will launch the “New Black Friday,” its five-day holiday sales event starting at 12:01 a.m. online on Thanksgiving. It also reflects Twitter’s shift over the past year into a direct-response marketing platform via the launch of products such as Website Cards that let marketers showcase their web site content within a tweet to drive shoppers to a particular part of their site such as a product page.

That’s been a marked pivot for Twitter, which for much of its existence was largely a platform that marketers used to build and promote their brands. Over the past year, Twitter has refocused on offering marketers an advertising vehicle that provides quantifiable results. For example, Twitter took a page from Facebook by offering a tool called Tailored Audiences that lets marketers use browser cookies and other information, such as consumers’ e-mail addresses, to reach their customers on the social network as well as a related tool called “Look-Alike” targeting, that lets marketers direct ads to shoppers who share traits with brands’ customers.

Twitter also moved away from its previous pay-per-engagement payment model to a system that lets an advertiser set a goal and pay when the campaign meets that objective. For example, a retailer can select as a goal that consumers download the retailer’s app or click through an ad to the Black Friday sale page on the retailer’s web site. The retailer would then pay only when a shopper downloads the app or clicks through to the web site.

The net result is a platform that encourages marketers to pay to reach their customers to drive them to click and buy—or to take other action, such as installing a mobile app—and to acquire new customers.

The retailers who stand to benefit the most from Twitter’s changes are those who understand how to leverage Twitter’s ad units including Promoted Tweets, which let a marketer pay to ensure a particular percentage of consumers see its message, says Nathan Jokinen, a former Target Corp. marketing executive who is now vice president of strategic development at digital marketing technology company Amobee.

“Organic tweeting is important,” he says. “But the promoted side helps marketers gain reach and allow more people, and the right people, to see a brand’s messages. The promoted side is vital to any campaign on Twitter—or anywhere else on social media. You have to pay to promote your messages to make sure that your messages are being seen.”

Getting a brand’s message in front of consumers helps build connections, Hirschle says. “People are looking at Twitter all the time—both in stores and online—and we’re giving marketers a way to engage with those shoppers in engaging ways that we can measure the impact of.”

For example, Kohl’s Corp. (No. 23 in the Internet Retailer 2014 Top 500 Guide) launched yesterday a Twitter trivia contest using a mix of paid and organic tweets to acquire new customers and engage its existing followers. Kohl’s contest involves the retailer tweeting out trivia questions to followers. Those who answer correctly using the hashtags #BlackFriday and #KohlsSweeps are entered for a chance to win a $500 gift card.

“What we really like about Twitter is it gives the ability to personalize paid media to make sure that we’re getting the right message to the right audience,” says Bevin Bailis, senior vice president, communications and public relations, who oversees social media strategy at Kohl’s. “There are thousands of conversations taking place throughout the day but by mixing paid and organic messages, we’re able to reach the right people.”

The retailer’s #KohlsSweeps hashtag ranked throughout the first day of the contest among the top three trending topics. That’s helping the brand reach shoppers it might not otherwise connect with, Bailis says.

“There are a lot of people in their late teens and 20s who digest information in a completely digital way,” she says. “So the only way we can reach them is by understanding where they’re looking—social networks like Twitter—and investing an appropriate amount to talk to them there.”

Bailis says Kohl’s plans on continuing its outreach to those consumers even after Cyber Monday. 

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