Twitter & Foursquare Partnership Rumours
“Social media has shaken up the world of sales, with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offering new ways to hound leads and unprecedented insights into clients.” – Ryan Holmes
The rumour mill was spinning earlier this week about the partnering of Twitter and Foursquare to improve Twitter’s geo targeting location services. According to a “familiar source” for Business Insider, this partnership is scheduled for 2015, and introduce geo-targeting features like Foursquare’s check-ins for Twitter to populate location-specific content. The improved geo targeting features may make its way to the populace as early as the first quarter of 2015, however exact details are not yet clear. However, there is no doubt that this partnership to improve Twitter’s location services would mean better targeting for brands – and comes at a great time after this year’s launch of Twitter ads.
This possible partnership is a big deal for Twitter, which has undeveloped geo-location services – Twitter can tell where users are when they create their profile and list their location in their bio, but tweets themselves aren’t geo-targeted.
Last month Twitter held an analyst presentation which outlined some of its plans to tackle location-based features. A test study found that users who were shown tweets that were tied to their registration location were more likely to open Twitter within 30 days than those that weren’t shown geo-targeted content. It’s lead to Twitter buffing up its location department, recently hiring a geo-lead from Foursquare (see picture above) and listing six other geo-engineering jobs on its website.
In May this year, Foursquare split its iconic app in two, resulting in two separate apps: Foursquare and Swarm:
Swarm focuses on the social features of the original Foursquare app, allowing users to share locations with their friends, whilst the revised Foursquare app uses the pre-existing check-in data to recommend places of interests for local search and discovery. Foursquare’s strength was also its second to none geo-targeting capabilities. The location data from Foursquare is pretty much used in nearly every single App that relies on some type of location-based data.
A lack of comments from both sides means this deal is still under speculation, but there is no doubt that a partnership like this would benefit both parties.
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