14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter will now allow its users to enter their birth date and show it on their main profile page, right under their other details like location, website, and join date.
To add your birthday to your profile, just click the "Edit Profile" button, and then go to the bottom left corner of your screen, in the sidebar, where it says "Birthday."
Click the field, and this should open up a bigger section, where users can enter their month, day, and year of birth.
The month and day fields are grouped together, while the year is displayed separately, allowing users to hide their age if they want to, and only show the day they were born.
Hiding your age can also be done by using Twitter's view permissions for the two sections, which allow account owners to show these details only for themselves, users who follow each other, the people whom the owner follows, only to their followers, or you might just not care and show it to everyone who accesses your account.
Twitter: Give me your birthday so I can give you better filtered ads
By adding the birthday field to user profiles, Twitter has quietly bolstered its advertising capabilities by allowing ads to support age-specific user groups.
While Google, Facebook, Bing, and Yahoo already have this type of information about their userbase, Twitter, since its beginnings, has been a no-hassle company that didn't even attempt to collect user information.
If you remember how Twitter started a few years back, the company was a success story thanks to its overall simplicity, to which its minimalist registration form also contributed.
This form, instead of tens of fields, only asked users for an email, password, and chosen username, something that was ground-breaking back then but is now a standard practice for most startups.
This allowed the social network to get lots of traction by quickly registering users, but when its advertising system was introduced, this left the company with absolutely no data on its userbase.
This is why location settings and different languages were added to the network as time went by, in an attempt to improve its ad delivery system.
By having the birthdays of its users displayed, Twitter is now capable of filtering ads based on the userbase's age groups. But hey, look at the bright side. Now Twitter also sends balloons to your profile on your birthday.
Wow. I'm so honored. twitter has sent balloons on my profile on Twitter for my 23rd birthday. I'm… https://t.co/aN7UQU9mU0
— Snober Alan Abbasi (@snobers) July 7, 2015
