Location Based Platforms

Facebook always tempts me to “Check In” with my current location. Does the world really want to know that I am sitting on my couch right now, or that I’m at Walmart for the fourth time this week? I don’t understand what is so alluring about the possibility of posting your location on Social Media. Is it for bragging benefits to you can showcase your fun and exciting life of travel? Is it used to connect with those that are in your close surroundings? Or do you do it to virtually journal your daily doings and happenings? I can say that I have used location based social media for all of the above reasons. Why do you do it? In this blog post I want to dive into why individuals, businesses, etc use location based platforms and how does it benefit them. 

The first blog that I read addressed the benefit of location tagging when other forms of tagging fails. This relates to our discussion in class when we talked about the hashtag used by Utah State University that was also used by another college. We can use tags to find similar posts, but somewhere in the middle non-related posts can get intermingled; in this instance it is beneficial to tag a specific location or event so that all related posts can be found and connected.

 BENEFITS

The article stated:

"What if the hashtag didn’t catch on? What if people were using your target keywords but weren’t actually at the event? What if they were posting valuable, actionable content, but didn’t use any relevant keywords at all?

Now, imagine searching for that location on a map, drawing a virtual perimeter around your area of interest, and visualizing the content coming only from within those boundaries regardless of what words were used.

For two weeks during the Olympics, we used Geofeedia’s platform to create virtual perimeters around 34 Olympic locations. Then, we gathered all geo-tagged content from five different sources (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa) and searched the data for posts that contained keywords like Olympics, London 2012, #london2012 and a number of others. Here’s what we found:

• 170,000 total geo-tagged posts from the 34 locations
• 69% did not contain one of our target keywords
• Many Instagram and Flickr photos didn’t contain a caption at all

Without a location-based social media monitoring tool, more than 115,000 social media posts originating directly from Olympic venues would have been difficult to find or lost entirely.

 While researching I came across a site solely used to post location tagging social media. I was amazed at how many of them are already out there and in use. There was many that offered similar benefits, but the majority offered a place for you to simply connect with those around you by posting your current location. There are many out there, which means people must be using them!

 Check out this post to see how many social media there are, that offers sharing location:

 Social Media to try

 

The last article I would like to discuss is one I found on http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/23/location-vs-communication/

It addresses the fact that location-based social media is not an essential use of Social Media. It is not what all the hype of networking is about. Users of Social Media do not create an account with a platform for their ability of tag their location, there are far greater benefits that will rank prior to location tagging. The article states that Social Media users have a “need to communicate at regular intervals — which is the driving force behind the rise and rise of mobile messaging apps. Far fewer people feel a similar imperative to regularly broadcast their location. Or tether their communications to a particular location. That’s got ‘niche use-case’ written all over it.”

From my research, it is evident that there are multiple reasons to use location tagging Social Media platforms. For some individuals there are very apparent benefits to it's use. Others view it as tool that is not essential to their social networking. Regardless of where your opinion lies, location tagging is a something that more and more sites are adapting to. 

So the world shall continue to see that yes, I am once again at Twizzleberry getting frozen yogurt.