Soon you will be able to search all the Twitter posts, blog posts and email newsletter content that originated at or near any specified location. What are the implications for marketers?

Twitter has stimulated a huge amount of creativity. Many people and organisations have embraced the concept of Twitter and are developing its potential brilliantly. We are now seeing some of these concepts feed back into more traditional news posting methods such as blogs and email newsletters.

One of the most interesting Twitter developments is the combination of local search with Twitter. There are some great ideas in this area for making your tweets more relevant and getting the most out of your local community with Twitter. These ideas revolve around the ability to search for tweets from or about a particular location. Such services start with the simple tracking of postings from a particular location, for example Nearby Tweets which is essentially a fresh coat of paint on the local aspect of Twitter’s own search engine. The site automatically determines where you are, and loads up a list of recent tweets and Twitter users within a specific radius.

Then there are loads of iPhone applications, some of which have built-in features for locating nearby Twitter users. Each of them basically functions the same, allowing you to search for tweeters near your exact location as determined by the geo-location feature on your iPhone.

Twitter also now offers a location-based search API. So there are going to be many more location based services built on Twitter. Interestingly the location of the tweet in this API “is preferentially taking from the Geotagging API, but will fall back to their Twitter profile”. Users currently have to enable the Geotagging feature, but I envisage that this will become common practice for marketers. For more information read:

• Think Globally, Tweet Locally
• Geotagging API Best Practices

Why will allowing Geotagging become common practice? Why will we be telling the world, not only what we are doing but where we are doing it?

The main reason is that this will help more people find us and make our tweets more relevant and engaging.

In December I attended the BIA/Kelsey Interactive Local Media 2009 Conference (ILM:09) in Los Angeles, California. At this conference Scott Moore and Cyrus Krohn from Microsoft gave us some insight into Microsoft’s plans for incorporating local tweets and blog postings in search results. They called this concept Neighborhood Layers:

The conference gave us many more examples of how local based posting search was a growing business model. One of the most engaging was Bargain Babe LA:

These services are genuinely useful. Imagine you are travelling to Los Angeles tomorrow - where are the good restaurant deals going to be? The best information is going to come from local people and businesses on the ground. Imagine you have arrived in Los Angeles and you need to find a salon for a haircut. Your iPhone will be able to locate not only the salons near where you are standing, but also give you feedback about how good they are from tweeters in LA.

So to come back to my original question - what are the implications for marketers?

It is no longer good enough to simply have a Web site that presents our offering to the searching audience. These new developments in search that place timing and location as key relevance filters mean that:

a) we will need to post regular updates about our offerings;
b) we will have to anchor these updates in real locations: the more the better.

This means we need to rethink our communications planning. Simply sending an email newsletter twice a month or once a week is not going to be enough. We need to be posting on blogs, Twitter, and sites like Bargain Babe more regularly, and we need to do it from key locations otherwise we will simply not appear on the new search radar. This means we need to be able to break up our e-newsletter content into smaller chunks, identify locally relevant content and then set up mechanisms for regular, local posting.

Lyris HQ has tools and services that can help you with these processes. In fact, Lyris HQ Web analytics is the perfect tool to measure the impact of local postings on traffic to your site so you can track the ROI of your efforts.

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