Following months of dropping hints and rumours spreading throughout both the Twitter and blogospheres, Twitter has finally taken aim at Google’s localisation functions with their new ‘Places’ feature.
Although many services have tried to blend geographic location with real time content, Twitter may well have the best chance of making it work. Essentially, ‘Twitter Places’ will highlight posts made around a particular area and give this location its own page and, thanks to its integration with several popular location-based applications such as Foursquare, the service can be used to find restaurants, shops, clubs and other places of interest nearby.
Internet Marketing
What impact this could have on the internet marketing world remains to be seen. Clearly the potential’s there, especially with the range of other services this new feature is integrated with including Gowalla, Localeze and TomTom as well as the aforementioned Foursquare, meaning that before Twitter Places is even fully available, there is a large databases of locations to hand.
It’s eminently possible that Twitter Places could be the next big thing in location-based internet marketing, especially taking into account its real-time nature compared to Google’s more static location features, but this could also be its undoing. As we posted yesterday, only 10% of businesses currently involved in Foursquare would pay for their presence and there seems to be a great deal of confusion as to what ROI it can generate or how one would go about leveraging it. There is also the understandable concern that people may have about telling the world exactly where they are at any one time which may limit its adoption from the increasingly privacy-conscious online social media user-base.
Search Engine Optimisation
As with everything in the search engine optimisation world, only time will tell whether this will have any impact on how sites are handled from an SEO perspective. The potential for a large ROI is there and with Google indexing Tweets into their real time results, it’s certainly something which agencies could be looking into, it’s now a case of finding out the best way that companies can leverage it.
Related posts: