Will Tweet for New Business: Part II (Plus Twitter Parodies)

Following up on last week’s post about utilizing Twitter for local advertising, Local Search News‘ Steve Espinosa argues that Twitter itself should provide better tools to do this.

The gist of his argument is that local (or location) is inherent in telling people what you’re doing (i.e., “sitting on my couch,” “having lunch down the street,” etc.). So why not structure these tweets around business listings or pages — or at least provide pages where these currently unstructured tweets can point?

Benefits include improved utility for users and better SEO friendliness and incoming links for related business searches. From this, many SMBs will find their Twitter “pages” after doing vanity searches, and could be targets for advertising upsells (claim profile, advertise on the network, etc.). It also becomes a potential partner for aggregators, local search sites and IYPs with existing advertisers.

It’s a strong case, though there are some complications such as conditioning users to use more proper nouns when referring to the places they are, and things they’re doing.  Twitter also has gotten a reputation for being somewhat stubborn in matters of its business model and its valuation, and has endured thousands of suggestions.

The dial has been turned up on Twitter mania considerably in the past few months through mainstream media, new users and some great parodies. Below are links to a handful of recent Twitter spoofs; most of them call out the amount of noise and trite content that fill the Twittersphere — and they’re absolutely right.

The challenge with Twitter will be to cut through the clutter or do some intelligent structuring to squeeze some value out of it, a la Espinosa’s suggestion. His argument holds up pretty well, and I’ll be curious to see if anyone at Twitter is listening (and yes, I’m going to tweet this post right now).

Current TV

The Daily Show

The Colbert Report

Flutter Parody

Enjoy.