Twitter testing Nearby as an awesome advertising tool

The Wall Street Journal blog today reported that Twitter is testing a service called Nearby that will allow users to share location. Time magazine described it this way:

“Nearby” includes a map on the upper-half of the screen with a blue dot marking the user’s location, while the bottom half reveals a feed of recent local tweets, using icons marking their location on the map.

Before you think this is about attracting more people to Twitter and increasing use, think again. While Twitter may be offering the consumer a way to connect to people having a shared experience like a football game or maybe a neighborhood on a Friday night, collecting your location alongside your thoughts has even more value for Twitter.

Way more value, in fact.

Local relevance

Nearby makes Twitter locally relevant, which matters enormously for selling advertisers on the benefits of targeting users with the most effective promoted posts. And it comes at a very important time: we’re in the age of high focus on customer experience management — anything that allows a marketer to know the context of the customer serves to significantly improve the effectiveness of offers and other forms of engagement.

More than just physical location

And it isn’t just where a person is physically. Nearby allows Twitter to target advertisements based on where a user is located, yes, but also what they’re saying (negative or positive) and the type of experience they’re having, such as dining, at an event or shopping. It’s hard to get more engaging than that. Marketers can also make their approaches more specific based on a trend or demographic in that location. Even more, weather, proximity to a store, propensities and current inventory levels of can be added to the mix to get even more specifically targeted.

At any time of the day, over 60% of users are accessing Twitter on a mobile device, giving Twitter a chance to “sandwich in” promoted tweets that take full advantage of this contextual information.

A new marketing requirement

Going one step further, not knowing a customer’s context is increasingly a poor way to market. In the advertising world, lacking context is called, “spray and pray,” and has been replaced by smart marketers with as much targeting as technology will allow. Sure, companies like Coca-Cola will still want to blast out brand messages to the masses, because everyone is a potential customer. But for most businesses, the cost of developing and spreading the best messages is too high to waste money talking to the wrong consumers.