To help them take advantage of these opportunities, Twitter last week announced a new event targeting tool that allow marketers to identify upcoming events that might be aligned with their target audiences, and to build campaigns around them.

The tool provides marketers with a searchable calendar of upcoming events.

For each event, marketers can view event insights that give them the ability to understand the audiences associated with those events.

For instance, Twitter’s tool can tell marketers that the total reach of the Tour de France is 20 million users, 64% of them are male and the majority use mobile devices.

Twitter also provides historical information, such as how many tweets and tweet impressions the event produced when it last occurred.

Once a marketer has identifed an event of interest, Twitter makes it easy for marketers to create campaigns around the event.

Great for agile marketing

Event targeting has been in beta, and marketers using it appear to like what it has to offer. According to Avi Ben-Zvi of SocialCode, clients have seen a 17.95% engagement rate and $0.10 cost per engagement.

Kaitlyn Bigica, a social media manager for agency MEC Global, said: “The tool has also been crucial in identifying purposeful investment opportunities through insight into conversation spikes, allowing us to tap into the most strategic moments and prepare conflicting creative for multiple scenarios.”

Of course, targeting live events effectively requires that marketers be prepared for move quickly and adapt their campaign as the events unfold.

Because of that, event targeting is most likely to appeal to marketers who are embracing the principles behind agile marketing and could provide further motivation for others to experiment with agile marketing.