Today twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com have released their new feature, Twitter Places. This localised search marketing tool will be rolled out over the coming week to Twitter fans in 65 countries and has already been dubbed ‘Foursquareish’. This means that Twitter, with their already hugely dominant position, could see Twitter Places favoured in what is still a relatively new game, and even exceed the popularity of Google Places.
Twitter Places
Twitter Places has already partnered up with Foursquare and a number of other companies with valuable data such as Tom Tom. This means that Twitter has the resources to match Google Places extremely fast by creating a Twitter page for each location. Users will then be able to visit that page and find out what other Tweeters have to say about it. Implications? If the chef is having a bad night and all the customers are tweeting about it, you could stand to lose a lot of money. On the other hand, if your service is outstanding and where the party is at, everyone in town will be there.
The power of real time results will mean that users of Twitter Places can access up to the minute information about a venue, business or service, which they will inherently trust more than a testimonials page, marketing content on a website; or more importantly, Google news feeds and blogs that may have been ‘tailored’ or out of date. The power of Twitter Places’ success lies in the very nature of Twitter, which is why it has the potential to oust Google as a preferred real time localised search tool.
Localised Search Marketing
The repercussion is that search marketing strategies will have to adapt to include real time social media campaigns to ensure that any bad publicity is watered down as necessary by implementing favourable real time tweets. This has the potential to weaken Twitter Places as the localised search tool we all really want, but just as SEO campaigns aim to use strategic manoeuvres to stay ahead of competitors that may use negative press as a marketing tactic, applying brand protection to a Twitter Places page may be just another move that is essential for online success.
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