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Twitter just rolled out a new feature to their advertising options which makes it easy to get in front of the right journalists and bloggers.

For awhile, you’ve been able to use Twitter ads to target the followers of certain accounts. So I could say “Hey Twitter, my target market is interested in social media and technology so serve my ads to people who follow @Mashable and are similar to its followers.”

And that’s great because you can target people based on their interests and similar characteristics.

How to Target Specific Users

But Twitter just made it possible for you to advertise to specific Twitter accounts.

So instead of having Twitter serve my ads to everyone who follows @Mashable, I can say “Hey Twitter, I have this list of 30 writers who work at Mashable, here are their Twitter handles – send my ads to them.”

Reach Hundreds of Journalists in Minutes

Let’s say you’re looking to get press for your new app.

Before, if you wanted to get a blogger or journalist to give your app a download and maybe write about it, you had to send tons of emails or packages to get their attention. Or maybe even hire a PR firm.

But with this new option to target ads to specific users, you can try serving ads just to these reporters.

To do that, you would compile a list of all of the relevant bloggers’ and journalists’ Twitter handles and paste them into a simple txt file.

You can have an assistant or someone on oDesk do this. (Or we can manage the entire ad process for you.)

A lot of the work has been done for you with Twitter lists – here’s a Twitter list of tech journalists.

Then upload them into your ad dashboard to create a new list audience.

You are then able to run an extremely targeted campaign just to reporters where you encourage them to download your app or send them to the press page of your site.

Other possibilities

This strategy can be applied outside of PR and bloggers. There are a ton of other possibilities for targeting specific Twitter accounts – what are some others you see?