Twitter introduces geo-targeting Promoted Tweets

by Marketing ON 23 July 2012

Twitter has introduced new targeting capabilities for Promoted Tweets that allow advertisers to target ads by location.

Previously advertisers could only send blanket messages to followers regardless of their location, making it impossible to target specific locations or take geographic sensitivities into account. Tweets targeted at users located in Sydney would show up to users in Melbourne for example, as well as users located throughout the world.

The announcement is likely to see more advertisers begin to experiment with Promoted Tweets for the first time now that making relevant, local offers is possible.

Twitter also announced that mobile app providers who only want to reach customers on one device can do so without sending the message to desktop users as well.

“Advertisers can compose targeted Tweets using the newly enhanced Tweet box in ads.twitter.com. As with all Promoted Tweets, advertisers only pay when users engage with it, and Tweets that generate the most engagement are likely to appear more often. Simply put, advertisers are rewarded for messages that resonate with audiences,” Twitter said.

The feature, which is now available to all advertisers globally who use Promoted Tweets, has been in beta testing for several weeks and Twitter has been working with a group of existing advertisers including @British_Airways, @CocaCola, and The Washington Post (@wpsocialreader), according to The Wall.

Six ways Foursquare will change your business

by Marketing ON 8 October 2010

A couple of weeks ago we launched retailer Borders Australia on Foursquare, starting with simple campaign which gives customers a 10% discount every time they check in three times. If the last sentence has got you rushing down to Borders to ‘check-in’ and bag a mayorship then good for you, you’re riding the crest of the wave. If you are wondering what on earth I’m on about then clearly you’re yet to become addicted to location-based social network Foursquare. I’m not going to go into what it does here, instead I urge you to check it out. I’m going to assume you already know what it is and what it does, and instead now tell you how you can use it to change your business.

One: Reward your most frequent customers

This is at the heart of what’s great for businesses on Foursquare. By registering yourself as the ‘owner’ of the business you can get a great, simple set of analytics which tell you who are your most loyal customers, who’s your mayor (most check-ins in last 60 days) and soon to come, how many people have unlocked your offers. In this way Foursquare can act as a sort of surrogate loyalty scheme, allowing you give freebies to your mayors or tailor specific offers to most loyal customers. This is an area Foursquare are still developing tools for and as they add more stats the possibilities for this gets very exciting.

Two: Get amazing (and honest) customer feedback

As well as being invited to check-in, customers can also leave tips about your business and comments on anything they like, from service to décor. Once, getting honest feedback about what you were doing was pretty tricky, now it’s there for all to see. This can become an invaluable way of discover issues in your business and indeed responding to them. By acting on comments quickly and effectively you’ll get much better customer loyalty than being ignorant to problems completely. And how about rewarding staff that perform so well it results in a positive comment? It could become a whole new part of your incentive structure.

Three: Increase the viral ‘mindshare’ of your business

Every time someone checks in at your business their other Foursquare friends are notified by a push notification, putting your brand in people’s pockets even if they’ve never checked in themselves. So a user with 50 friends will message 50 people every time they check in. Do this with 50 users and that’s a fair bit of pretty broad local area marketing, all for free.

Four: Promote special offers to passers by

This is obviously the most obvious ‘tool’ at businesses disposal when using Foursquare. Whenever a user checks into any venue Foursquare flags if there is a special nearby, and allows the user to view it and see where it is. By offering specials that are linked to check-ins or badges, businesses can reward loyalty and encourage interaction with their brand. It’s a simple and quick way of getting involved in Foursquare but more importantly will drive footfall and revenue as users return to your business time and time again to unlock offers.

Five: Use tips to communicate more personally with customers

Tips can be used in some really creative ways to encourage user interaction with your brand or business. For example, the History channel recently partnered with Foursquare in the US to allow users to unlock secret ‘tips’ about certain locations whenever they checked into them. By unlocking enough tips they could gain the History Channel badge, all of which was part of a promotion for a series of programmes to be aired on the channel about US history. This sort of promotion can work on a small scale too, by offering tips about your own business or services which customers may not have known otherwise.

Six: Get ready for ‘Places’

Arguably one of the most important reasons for getting the hang of location-based services like Foursquare is to be ready for Facebook’s own geo-location service; ‘Places’, just released in the last few days. This takes the features of Foursquare, plus adds a few, and then integrates with the most popular website on the planet. With 150 million smartphones worldwide running the Facebook app already, the potential for this is absolutely huge and will almost guarantee that location services are around for a long, long time to come. Adding them to your marketing mix now will give you a huge advantage when everyone else starts to jump on this in a year’s time!

Finding location, losing privacy

by David Iwanow ON 25 June 2010

The latest, growing social media trend is location based services like FourSquare, but are consumers ready for the privacy issues that location data brings?

The Apple iPhone is one of the leading smartphone platforms, but has the recent iOS4 Software update enabling iAd gone too far? It seems Apple has created a catch 22 situation: users can opt out of being served targeted ads by visiting oo.apple.com, but then miss out on many iPhone benefits.

If you don’t want to share your exact location details with Apple then you may not have access to future apps from iTunes. So as a consumer you have to decide to provide Apple with your real-time geographic locations or not have access to its iPhone applications.

Apple highlights that your detailed user location information is only available to all its partners and licensees… which only appears to leave out those not using its platform? This change is a move designed to protect iAd advertisers and potentially iPhone app developers, but at what cost to privacy?

Apple’s changes to its user agreement seems similar to Facebook’s recent privacy changes, which gave great benefit to advertisers but not users. The Facebook change to ‘Like’ pages combined with the recent Wikipedia-style pages made the users profile data more easily targeted by advertisers.

Not wanting to be left out of the location game, Facebook appears to be on the verge of launching its own location-based features, but will privacy be again compromised by forced opt-in? The Facebook feature is likely to be similar to the recent Twitter Places update where users can opt to tag the tweet with their current location.

The new Twitter update allows users to “Add your location” with every individual tweet, but was already available by external platforms such as UberTwitter.

The interesting aspect for advertisers using FourSquare as a platform is they can begin to better target those who are visiting their venues or in the nearby area. The benefit is that a local Las Vegas tour company can now target those who are just visiting Las Vegas and not waste marketing dollars on local residents by offering them visitor promotions*.

But on a different campaign Hard Rock Casino, Las Vegas can provide a special birthday offer for Las Vegas residents who have checked in with FourSquare at nearby venues. The potential benefit of geo-targeting is a more relevant audience with localised ads allows advertisers to deliver better ROI on their local marketing campaigns.

The potential concern for consumers sharing so much information is that companies like Apple and Google may not be able to quell privacy fears about their behaviour data gathered on iPhone and Android. For marketers will applications like FourSquare increase their importance for local marketing while still enabling enough granular settings to protect the user privacy?

*Disclaimer: The Lost Agency is working with this client.