Is Twitter’s Location Tool the Next Big Draw in Internet Advertising?
Close to the heels of Twitter’s announcement of its location tracking tool and its service sharing with Yahoo, Facebook issued a media release that users will be able to get status updates with the current location of their friends before the end of April .
An elated Yahoo! Vice President Bryan Lamkin had announced last month a Yahoo/Twitter deal with groundbreaking features to be disclosed later. On Thursday Twitter unveiled its much talked about new feature that gives users the option of posting their location when they tweet.
If you were visiting Saks Fifth Avenue, you could actually "location tweet" your arrival using this feature. This would supposedly drive others to the high-end store and increase their sales traffic, as well as your esteem in the eyes of your peers in regards to your spending habits. Twitter sees this sort of user behavior across the site all the time. Anamitra Banerji, head of monetization at Twitter, said last month, "People are constantly talking and engaging with brands, sharing their feedback.”
Mason Wiley, Sr. VP of Marketing for Hydra, one of the largest performance based online advertisers, was skeptical of Twitter's ad conversion. He felt that unlike Google’s AdWords, Twitter has an informal conversation format, making it rather difficult for the small and medium advertiser to estimate the value of monetization. However, Twitter ads could be extremely effective for large mass media campaigns.
It is this small and medium advertiser that is in the biggest focus in the digital media, as large corporations almost always prefer the expensive print media. With digital media ad-spend due to topple print media this year and touch the $120 billion mark, Facebook’s advance announcement was perhaps a strategy to make the media spender wait until the annual Facebook developers conference in late April, when the Facebook location tracking application is likely to be unveiled.
Already Google’s entry into Facebook and Twitter's turf with Google Buzz has unnerved the company. The launch of Google apps marketplace last week and cross platform integration facilities with Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail as well as location tracking was a pointed message there that the best value for money on ad spend would be by using Google across the board. Understandably Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook all need to respond.
