Media Money with Julia Boorstin

Twitter makes a push for last-minute holiday ad dollars

Twitter to track shoppers' habits
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Twitter to track shoppers' habits

As advertisers decide how to spend their last-minute ad dollars, Twitter is sending the message that its ads are a must buy for the big holiday shopping season. On Tuesday, Twitter unveiled the results of a new survey of 1,000 adults conducted in partnership with DB5 Research, on Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping.

The focus of the study—and the results—seem designed to convince marketers that Twitter's promoted ad products are a particularly useful way to reach consumers looking to spend money on those two key holiday shopping days.

The bottom line of the study: Twitter's users spend more money, are more likely to shop on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday than non-Twitter shoppers, and use Twitter to decide where to shop. So, it all points to why and how marketers should use the service.

Twitter's head of global research, Jeffrey Graham, who helps craft these kind of research studies said, "Just as Twitter's becoming a really important companion to TV, it's becoming a really important companion to shopping as well."

Perhaps even more notable, he said that Twitter users aren't behaving differently because Twitter appeals to a certain demographic, but rather that "there's something about the adoption of the technology that's changing people's behavior."

The study found Twitter users spend 19 percent more than the average Black Friday shopper and 14 percent more than the average Cyber Monday shopper. Among respondents who shop both days, Twitter users averaged a total of $700 more than non-Twitter users.

(Read more: Internet either loves or hates Twitter)

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Twitter and DB5 honed in on the social network's role in planning holiday shopping—a focus that could help draw certain types of ads. The study finds more Twitter users plan for Black Friday a week in an advance than average shoppers. And 56 percent of Twitter users said it's one of the first places they go to research products. Seventy-eight percent said if they saw a tweet about a sale at a nearby retailer they'd visit the store on Black Friday.

(Read more: Twitter honchos hit $4 billion jackpot)

Graham said Twitter is proving such a powerful tool for shopping, because "it isn't something that only happens when people are at home or at work." Because Twitter is inherently mobile, "It's something they carry with them; they share their shopping experiences in real time." Graham pointed to the fact that Twitter users are deviating from their shopping lists, which he attributes to what people see on Twitter.

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The fact that Twitter ads can be targeted to key words, and can react in real time, means the potential to reach consumers when they're in the moment, trying to decide between products or which store to visit. We'll see if the results of this survey draw more advertisers and give Twitter's fourth-quarter numbers a boost.

—By CNBC's Julia Boorstin. Follow her on Twitter: @JBoorstin.