Starting today, Twitter has enabled users to add context to their content. By partnering with Foursquare, tweets now have a geolocation option available so that you not only know who is saying what and when, but where they are when they say it. Joining with Foursquare is a smart move on Twitter’s part due to the location-based app’s growing popularity and similarity in type of posts. This continued feature sharing seems the logical next move: Foursquare updates are already posted on Twitter, among other sites, and social networks are increasingly incorporating location, so why not Twitter Place?
This isn’t a particularly earth shattering development in the digital world, but it does expand the way people communicate. This digital marketing development serves to further extend the abilities of social networks, allowing them to enter into consumers’ worlds and connect them more tightly to businesses and companies they frequent. This is where the opportunity lies: through Foursquare and Twitter you can give potential customers incentive to visit your business using fun and voluntary networking sites. Word of mouth is now digital and scalable, and people are happily participating in and engaging with digital marketing.
Twitter is also highlighting the ability to search for recent tweets from specific locations, so that if you are headed to a restaurant, you can see what people who have eaten there think about the place. At first glance, this basically seems like Twitter is stealing Foursquare’s value proposition, but what Foursquare gains is exposure and additional relationships with businesses due to Twitter’s larger number of users. The major selling point for Twitter Place is that it enhances Twitter’s ability to provide users with the tweets and posts that are most relevant to what they are doing at that time. When someone searches for a location, they will see all of Twitter’s, Foursquare’s and Gowalla’s most recent comments on that venue.
This relevancy is becoming a common theme as search and social networks move to real-time environments. Bing is incorporating Twitter and Facebook into search results, Google’s Caffeine is constantly indexing and updating search, and people are posting opinions about the exact location they are in, at the exact time they are there. This opens the door to marketers who will now be able to find people tweeting from competitor venues, and gives them the opportunity to sway consumers if the location post is used effectively. This could mean anything from luring patrons from a similar, nearby retail store with a discount, to bringing in new dinner reservations by posting a special or positive feedback. The next step may be a Facebook location app that is compatible with the others, increasing the “places database” and expanding geolocation. However location based posting expands next, it will be important for marketers to understand the opportunity and capitalize on it, because these brand-aware users will be paying attention.
