With more data available about audiences, behaviour, timing and now location, we are seeing social advertising maturing into a powerful option for marketers. Location data is the newest and potentially most exciting strand of social targeting to emerge for social media advertisers, but in order to use it you must also understand its limitations.

Facebook recently introduced the ability to target ads around a specific address, allowing users to simply type in the zip code and street number of a business and select a radius distance around it that you want to reach.

Twitter also lets you target by zip-code and an increasing number of regions and neighbourhoods around the globe. What’s more, with their tailored audiences, you can upload lists using your own location-based research. Tweets can pinpoint a Tweeter’s location to within a matter of feet.

Companies have already started using this type of rich data to drive campaigns and business decisions. And there is clearly considerable opportunity for social advertising when used in conjunction with new technologies, such as the single user interface ticketing being trialled on Twitter by sports teams such as the Atlanta Hawks, and musical acts like Slayer.

Social media lets us reach audiences across the world, but reaching the exact right audience is where the real value, and the real social ROI, will lie. And location is a powerful context with which to begin building those audiences.

Ads targeted at people who have recently been to a particular mall or airport, for example, might provide relevant deals to encourage them to return or that reward them for being regular visitors.

But, and there’s a big but, to have location coordinates attached to your Tweets you need to opt-in (it is turned off by default).

This means that only a small percentage of Tweets are geotagged. Whether this percentage will rise as a younger generation becomes less concerned with sharing their location, or shrink further still as our society craves more privacy, remains to be seen.

 

By Nick Taylor, Product Marketing Executive at Brandwatch. 

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