RMM Briefing: Twitter Places

What is it?

Last week, Twitter announced Twitter Places in a major step towards location. Places isn’t a new platform, but an added functionality which allows you to ‘tag’ your Twitter updates with a location.

If you have enabled Twitter Places on your account, you can write an update and tag it with a general location (London) or something more specific (like 221B Baker Street).  Additionally, clicking a tagged location will show you any other tweets from that location. Twitter has integrated this nifty feature with location services Foursquare and Gowalla - so when you do click a location, listed tweets will include ‘check ins’ from these external services.

At the moment, Twitter Places is only available in-browser, meaning if you use anything other than the Twitter website to publish your updates, you can’t use the new functionality. According to Twitter however, this will change in the near future.

Who’s going to use this?

We’ve defined an audience and some examples of how they’ll use Twitter Places using Forrester’s social technographics.

Creators

• Will take advantage of Twitter Places’ API to create location-based news mashups, like a visualisation of all World Cup tweets coming out of South Africa.
• Will use location-based updates to follow a particular ‘patch’, like hyperlocal news organisations keeping track of particular roads and areas and use this to create additional content, such as feeds from particular places.

Conversationalists

• Will use location-based tweets to organise social events and locate relevant local people to engage with.
• May become associated with, and representative of a particular place (like Foursquare Mayors).
• Will add specific locations (like restaurants, shops and bars) to Twitter’s current database of places.

Critics

• Will use Places to provide feedback on services in specific places.

Collectors

• Will tag their own updates with specific locations.
• Will collate and follow feeds of updates from specific places which are relevant to them.

Twitter Places and local businesses

• The key focus for local businesses will be identifying their local network on Twitter – and then infiltrating that community. Twitter Places makes this process much simpler.
• Places could be an excellent way to identify (and create rewards for) loyal advocates and regular visitors.
• Local businesses can use Places to create word-of-mouth campaigns around their specific location.

UPDATE: 24/06/10

Behold, buzz monitoring wizards Sysmos have launched Fourwhere, a great example of a location mashup, which combines user comments left on Gowalla, Foursquare and Yelp! (thought not Twitter Places – yet?) to allow you to read recommendations of local places. So type in ‘Waterloo, Lambeth, Greater London’ and you learn this rather useful fact about the McDonald’s opposite the station: