Twitter partners with Foursquare to put location-based marketing higher on the map

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In today’s social media climate, there appears to be a constant flooding of information, which has seemingly contributed to the drowning of user engagement.

Twitter, a top social media networking site with over 310 million users, has recently stated of her intention, to partner with search and discovery provider Foursquare. At present, it is believed that Twitter has a very limited location-based service for users and advertisers. This news is expected to be met with open arms and visible grins from twitter users and marketers respectively.

You might be wondering why this partnership is so important for Twitter and its users. If you are not too sure as to how this will enhance the Twitter experience, look no further, as the next few sections will shed some light on some of the apparent benefits and the growing focus on location-based marketing in 2015.

Benefits of Twitter’s partnership with Foursquare from a user’s perspective:

1) Better discovery: Via Twitter, people can now discover interesting places and venues in their city of origin or residence. As an alternative to TripAdvisor, people will now be able to look up reviews and opinions from real customers via tweets that are tagged to these locations. It is also expected that the discovery feature will have foursquare-like venue check-ins in tweets.

2) Sense of pride and appreciation: This new feature will now afford the tagging of popular and obscure places. People that reside or were born in small cities, now have the opportunity to tag interesting things about their cities. This will definitely give some users a sense of pride as their cities and its attraction will be made visible to the twitter community.

3) Mitigation of social media overload: So many people give up Twitter and other social media platforms due to an overwhelming feeling, emanating from the number of irrelevant feeds that stream on their account. A location-based content delivery, will help bring some organisation and a sense of order to the tweets users receive.

These are a few of the benefits that users stand to gain from the partnership between Twitter and Foursquare. We will now look at location based marketing and the apparent advantages for marketers in light of this new partnership.

Location based marketing and what marketers stand to gain as Twitter partners with Foursquare

Location-based marketing is triggered by the increasing use of mobile devices as Julie Ask of Forrester, believes these devices are disruptive technologies that have completely impacted upon customer expectations. Forrester views this re-defined customer expectation as a ‘mind shift’ and predicts that progressive companies will use mobile to transform their business model and product offerings- tagged as ‘mobile moments.’ ComScore predicts that mobile device users will reach about 1.8 billion in 2015 compared to 1.6 billion of their desktop counterparts. This further establishes the increasing need for mobile marketing. This sets the premise for location-based marketing that is set to increase with Twitter’s intended partnership with Foursquare.

Location-based marketing does leverage on the GPS functionality in mobile devices to push the relevant content to customers based on their current whereabouts. Larry Alton wrote a good piece that focused on how location-based marketing is set to evolve in 2015. In this article, he predicted that mobile ordering is set to begin, stores will push coupons, navigation will become more sophisticated and most importantly, he stated that Facebook places will take on Foursquare. This last prediction of his is spot on, as Twitter is now partnering with Foursquare to compete with Facebook places and other competition. Let’s look into how businesses and marketers will gain from this trend.

1) Better Target marketing: With location-based marketing, re-kindled with Twitter’s partnership with Foursquare, marketers can now target relevant content to persons based on their location (not just the location on their Twitter bio). This helps to channel products and services to specific locations that will be of more value than a blanket or guess marketing process.

2) Higher ROI: Marketers are likely to get a better return on investment when they deliver contents that are relevant to customers. These tweets are likely to get a favourite, a retweet, a following and possibly a visit to the given website. With these possibilities, the business is likely to get a better return on her investment.

3) Richer behavioural data: With a location-based functionality in Twitter, marketers can better analyse how certain customers from a given area react to their brands. A good example might be to understand the time of day when people from a given area do take action on a given tweet. Some locations with a large working class community, people may respond to tweets during their lunchtime and other places with a higher number of college students may witness twitter actions from mid –afternoon to the later evenings.

4) Become a local legend: Location-based marketing is expected to help small businesses become more popular within their local community. As people tag these businesses, other residents can discover and share this business.

The bigger picture for Twitter is that a location based service will help to consolidate and possibly increase the number of active users. A study carried out by Twitter indicated that new users are likely to re-open twitter within 30-days, if a location-based content was shown on their feed. In the words of Ivana Trump: “For example, if I make money, I put it in real estate. I always did very well. Location, location, location.” As location is important to real estate so it is with engagement on Twitter. Location-based marketing is here to stay.

Dateme Tamuno
Dateme Tamuno (Tubotamuno) is currently working as part of the SEO and PPC delivery team for UK based digital agency, Cariad Marketing. He has also completed a book on user-generated content marketing.

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