Twitter and...location

The possibility to target someone with advertising is extremely powerful because companies can fine tune their commercial offers based on their customers’ gender, age, profession, location, etc. And even consumers are happier to be targeted because they can receive better offers. What’s the point in receiving an annoying promotion of a Los Angeles store if we live in New York?! Location in particular I think it’s a very important targeting tool and in fact, a big success factor of many mobile applications is their ability to be location based. If I search on google map or on yelp for a restaurant my phone proposed me all the restaurants close to my current position. However being able to be “local” doesn’t have to be just a privilege of mobile applications, it could also be the key to success of one of the most popular social networks of the moment. This morning I was reading a very interesting article on Techcrunch about the opportunity for Twitter to gain even more success by becoming “local”, connecting people to places. The article suggests that Twitter should distinguish between regular and business accounts and then use Twitter Places to link pages with the corresponding business accounts and aggregate content from other local sources. Twitter could then add a “where to follow” section to increase the visibility of Twitter Places and become the leader in aggregating all explicit (Foursquare, geo-tagged tweets) and more implicit (Instagram) check-ins to be able to organize what’s happening in any neighborhood. It could also enable paying advertisers to geo-target tweets to followers in a particular location (e.g., Whole Food would be able to make weekly promotions only to New Yorkers without alienating users in other cities) and set up a sort of “Google Alerts” where people get notified when keywords (e.g., location, club, food) happen nearby. By engaging users on a local level and increase usage by local businesses, Twitter could find a lot of natural monetization opportunities.