What’s the point? Why would you want people to see where you are all the time?

Andrew Bates
Director of Social Media
The fact is that many businesses have proven ROI and value by taking advantage of these geotargeted check-in services.  Over the last few years location based services, like Foursquare, have become more and more common.  With these social profiles, smartphone and tablet app users are able to share their location as part of their profile privacy settings or through the application.  The best part – these social networks and apps are free.  But more importantly, according to SocialTimes, “Pew Research Center found that over a quarter of American Adults are using mobile and social location-based services (LBS).”  A great infographic is also included in SocialTime’s article.

With the ever-increasing use, even B2B marketers should take note of the value of these services.  Here are a few concepts to consider:

LBS for Advertising

-          Sponsored Tweets – If you plan to advertise in Twitter, note that organizations with the fastest ROI with the greatest efficiency are targeting specific regions, cities and demographics.

-          Foursquare – Foursquare has made it easy for organizations to focus on specific regions and demographics.

-          Facebook – We all know Facebook likes to share as much personal profile information as it can get away with, especially as it continues to grow its advertising.  Facebook Places can allow your organization to take advantage of finding your exact audience.  B2B industries are often regionalized to some degree.

LBS for Social SEO

-          Any and all social media activity can help your organization rank in traditional search engines, like Google, when you have a cohesive strategy.  When your organization’s offices have a presence on these networks, your employees checking into regional offices will help with your brand awareness in social networks and search engines.

LBS for Events

-          Utilizing location based services is increasingly important for B2B and B2C organizations.  When utilized properly, your organization can receive a more active and larger audience.  Most people only attend a few sessions each day.  Make yours stand out by promoting events and utilizing the services for contests that can drive more attendees to your tradeshow booth.

Brand Awareness

-          LBS services are great for brand awareness.   When someone searches for your organization in social networks like Facebook, your profile and office locations all have the opportunity to rank.

Internal Community

-          With so much focus on building a larger active customer audience online, businesses often overlook the concept of building an internal community of employees.  Social media and LBS services are great for internal contests and teambuilding exercises.  Imagine if everyone in your organization checked into all of your offices.  Also it is proven that corporate culture has a major impact when employees are more engaged and happy in their roles.  Make it fun.

With these ideas in mind, now think about which tools will give your organization the greatest benefit.

Location Based Services to Watch in 2012

-          Foursquare – Foursquare is arguably the leader in LBS usage.  Starting in 2009, this network and application really set the pace.  There are opportunities to advertise and users can have a check-in from foursquare automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many other social profiles.  Users can also tag other users when they are in the same location.

-          Facebook Places – Facebook does what any good business does – it learns from the successes of other networks.  With all of the user profile data and businesses participating, that made it easy for Facebook to add a check-in LBS feature that has seen great adoption.  Like Foursquare, Facebook Places allow a user to tag other friends in the same location.

-          Twitter – Twitter does not have a check-in feature, but it likely has a users location based on the user profile configuration.  Twitter allows advertisers to take advantage of advertising to specific regions.  Also Twitter’s smartphone app has a feature to tag your location with any tweet.

-          Google Latitude – As expected, Google wants in on the game.  Right now Google+ and other Google features are a bit disjointed.  Latitude has not seen major success, but it is Google, so it will likely become an important part of location based marketing.  Google loves to rank its own properties and services.  With Google+ at approximately 90 million users and Latitude growing to 10 million at the beginning of this year, you are likely to see it more and more.

The key with location based services is that just like social media marketing in general, LBS will become a “necessary evil” in digital marketing.   LBS services offer free or cost effective value for brand awareness, search engine optimization and advertising.  I recommend that B2B, B2C, organizations and nonprofits look closely at ways to add location based activity to their social media programs to get that extra boost and to be ready for the next phase of social media marketing.