Twitter has been wrestling with the location game for some time with a couple fits and starts landing most recently on something they call Twitter Places. The ultimate goal, I suspect is to become a player in the Foursquare check in kind of way. I have my doubts as to whether they can claim this turf, but I think it’s worth paying a little attention to.
If you have a business where people check in, an office, retail store or restaurant or bar, you can and probably should add your place of business so that people can simply click on your place and add the address automatically.
It’s a pretty cool feature from a Twitter standpoint because you can tell people where to meet you or where a big event is happening then Twitter will add the location details, including a map, without cutting into your 140 characters.
The image above is what people see at Twitter.com when they click on the location part of your tweet. (Tweetdeck and Twitter for the smartphone all seem to handle it a bit differently, but if it catches on I imagine you’ll see this added to all 3rd party tools.)
There are a couple things that will likely hold large scale adoption back. First people with lots of random followers won’t always want to give their location away and you’ve got to turn location on in settings and manually choose it each time. However, I do think it will be used for events and can’t hurt to get your business listed.
Here’s how you get listed. (There is no formal process you just add your business as a user)
1) Log in to twitter.com and got to setting – make sure “Add a location to your tweets”
2) Go to your home page and write a tweet.
3) Click on the location at the bottom of the tweet (it will ask to choose your current location and try to find you)
4) Click on whatever location is there and scroll to bottom and select search places (unless you already see your location on the list)
5) Put in your City to search and then after it searches click Add This Place
6) Enter the name and address of your business and that’s it.
7) Now when you tweet from your business it will add your location and others can choose it too
