Kik Adds Targeting To Promoted Chats For Brands

Brands using mobile messaging app Kik to make connections with fans got an upgrade today. Kik announced that it has added the ability to target followers by gender, geography and mobile device.

It’s another move by the Waterloo, Ontario-based company to position itself as a more-brand friendly alternative to Snapchat. Both messaging apps are wildly popular, especially among young teens and millennials, but Kik is making a stronger play to directly link businesses with that highly coveted audience.

In August, Kik gave users the ability to follow and communicate with brands via Promoted Chats. Then in November, it enhanced that chat product by enabled brands to customize automated responses based on keywords in messages from fans.

The effort has been very successful, Kik reported today. The company said it has more than 60 brands — including Funny or Die, Seventeen Magazine, Skullcandy and Vans — in the program. More than 10 million users have opted into a conversation with a brand and exchanged more than 250 million total messages. Users have sent more than 1.7 million messages to Seventeen Magazine since September.

Now Kik is adding basic demographic targeting — male or female, iOS or Android and United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada — and an improved analytics dashboard that includes views, clicks and actions.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor. Follow Martin on Twitter (@MartinBeck), Facebook and/or Google+.

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