Twitter Partners With Foursquare For Specific Location Tagging In Tweets

Through a partnership with Foursquare, Twitter is adding the ability to tag specific locations to Tweets. Business Insider first reported rumored talks of this partnership late last year, with speculation that the geolocation services would arrive in the first quarter of 2015. Now, a Twitter representative says that this feature will be rolled out in the United States and Canada over the next few weeks, with other markets to follow.

Previously, location services in Twitter detected a users’ coordinates based on their device sensors and assigned a spot based on those parameters. With the new feature, users will be able to tap the location button to access a list of nearby suggested places, so that they can ID a very specific spot of their choosing. Now, instead of a simple geographic location such as “New York,” users can choose a more contextual location, such as “Grand Central Station, NYC.”

Many digital marketing experts feel that the Twitter-Foursquare partnership makes a lot of sense for both companies. For Twitter, having enhanced location tagging should help to improve its user engagement, particularly with new users. Last November, Twitter talked about a test that the company conducted with new users from major cities, where the company showed them location-relevant Tweets before they built their own timeline. The test found that new users who were shown location-based content were more likely to reopen Twitter within 30 days than those who were not.

For Foursquare, the company has been experiencing some struggles to regain its footing after spinning off check-ins to its Swarm app last year, so the partnership with Twitter provides a reminder that Foursquare still has a strong location database with great value in its data collection and data points assets.

Twitter is the most recent of a growing number of services that are tapping into Foursquare’s location data, including Pinterest and Flickr. Foursquare co-founder and CEO, Dennis Crowley, has stated that the goal of the company has always been “to create a system that could crawl the world with people in the same way Google crawls Web pages with machines.”

Crowley has said that the concept behind Foursquare has been to “build a company that would bring our vision of context-aware services-software that can learn about the places you’ve been and can proactively recommend places you’d love to hundreds of millions of people.”

Crowley’s vision is applauded by corporate supporters of the company, such as Ben Horowitz, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a board member of Foursquare.

“The Foursquare platform is a pretty fast-growing SaaS [Software as a Service] business compared to the other new SaaS businesses we’re invested in,” said Horowitz. “To build [Foursquare’s data business] from nothing would be exceptionally difficult.”

Foursquare’s data trove is certainly massive, with reports of the company having collected 7 billion check-ins at 65 million places, 70 million user-generated tips and 90 million “tastes.”

It will be interesting to see how the new grasnular location tagging ability on Twitter is received by users as it rolls out over the next few weeks. Further details about the new feature can be read on the Twitter support page.