Twitter's "Local Trends" a Precursor to Geo-Targeted Ads for News Media

Twitter announced to relatively little fanfare last week that it has started tracking "Local Trends." This development portends a potential source for new ad revenue not only for Twitter but for its media partners.

First, according to a post by jennadawn on the company's official blog on Jan. 26, "Last week we began to slowly roll out a new feature called Local Trends to expose what people are talking about on the state and city level, and today we've fully launched so everyone can use it."

"Trending Topics" (usually preceded by a hashtag, e.g. #) have evolved as a method for heavy Twitter users to see what is hot at the moment in the micro-blogging world -- and increasingly in the outer world as well.

One might have forgotten, for example, that today is "Groundhog Day," unless one checked in at Twitter.

Meanwhile, as any journalist will tell you, "all news is local," at least in its origin, so Twitter's move makes a great deal of business sense now that it has emerged as the breaking news channel of choice.

Combined with Twitter's development of geo-coding, the new Local Trend feature implies geo-targeted advertising as a source of future revenue for the company and its partners. Several news organizations, including The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and the Austin-American Statesman are already experimenting with charging local advertisers for Tweets posted under their accounts.

For additional context about the development of emerging business models for Twitter and its media partners, please follow these BNET links:
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