Just read an article on Social Media Today about the slow death of location based social media marketing. While I’m not sure if it’s headed for extinction, I do think there’s evolution.
The usual life cycle of hot technologies and marketing approaches is:
- New cutting edge idea
- One or two experts corner the market
- A big guy comes in, buys niche expert or recreates tech on their own
Looks like the same has happened for location based marketing. Why do I need to use FourSquare when I can check in with Facebook or Yelp? Facebook and Yelp both have core offerings that are more useful to me than location based services alone.
I think there’s definitely value for physical stores and even pop-up events to use location based marketing that capitalizes on groups of people being in the same place at the same time, or even at different times. So I don’t foresee the approach dying out, it’ll just evolve and integrate into the other tools already in marketers’ arsenals.
What do you think?
Shanee Ben-Zur 