Upping the game is something twitter has been doing consistently instead of announcing mega deals unlike a few social media players. The latest news from the twit corner is that the social media giant will provide venue suggestions in partnership with Yelp in UK and Japan.
It was around March last year that Twitter bonded with Foursquare to provide location tags in US. Before this, location services on twitter worked based on device sensors thus assigning a geographical location based on those parameters.
By getting cozy with Foursquare’s big competitor Yelp for location services when someone tweets from a particular place, Twitter has shown the rules of game can be different for markets that are markedly different from one another.
This is just one of the ways in which Twitter decided to increase its functionality making it even more interesting with time. Twitter has already rolled this feature, rather quietly so, in Germany already. It is said that France would be the next stop for this. Right now, Twitter is perceived as a rather no frills kind of social media player who has not indulged in fancy free elements to increase its utility.
However, tagging location by itself may not change the game for twitter. Rather, what may help, is the fact that a similar experiment by Facebook has seen rather encouraging response.
Hence, when tweeters tag their location using Yelp, it does provide tangible data on user behavior and potential for advertising. This is a total win win situation for both twitter and yelp since both are significant players in their own respective territory, though twitter may have been there for a longer period of time. In the long run, this tie up will encourage yelp stay updated. Users tagging venue and using it to rate their experiences may provide a huge business opportunity for advertisers to leverage on consumer behavior data.
With Twitter, Yelp has been extremely generous as far as receiving user data is concerned. Yelp in the past, had encouraged its users to share their feedback and user reviews on both twitter and facebook, in order to get a rather direct feedback.
By way of creating new interface along with tagging location, if this rejoinder of twitter and yelp can create new platforms that can break the conventional usage and mode of social media platforms, that would add a lot of dimensions into an already interesting game.
