Twitter is preparing a new kind of targeted advertising that has filmgoers in its sights – with tweets about films generating adverts relating to the user’s tastes.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter, Twitter’s global head of research Jeffrey Graham said: “Our recent research shows that Twitter is a major influence on movie choice. Not only are people hearing about new movies on Twitter, they are using it to make a decision about what to see, then sharing their experience with friends.”

Twitter is therefore trying to capitalise on that massive global conversation, by feeding relevant advertising to the people talking about certain films. For example, if a user is tweeting about a film from the Marvel stable, Twitter can target users mentioning not just the movie, but the characters in it, other Marvel titles, other superhero genre films, or any other keywords it specifies. The technology joins a similar strategy used by Twitter to target fans of certain TV shows.

Targeted advertising, long used by Google via its AdWords technology, is being rolled out across social networks – Instagram is the latest, recently launching a tentative introduction of advertising for the photo-sharing app.