Mobile Geo Marketing Lags

Wired reports: Marketers should avoid advertising on Foursquare and other location-based social networks because not enough people use them, according to a Forrester Research report. Only four out of every 100 online adults have ever used a social service that tracks their locations — and only 1 percent use such a service more than one time per week, according to Forrester.

Location-targeted advertising on mobile devices holds lots of promise for marketers, because they will be able to send ads to people, based on where they are and where they’ve been, along with other methods already in use. However, the market for location-based apps and services is still far too immature to support a robust advertising industry, claims Forrester, except for brands that want to run small tests of how to target male users.

“The market is quite nascent, with only a reads few million consumers using geo-location apps monthly,” an excerpt from the $500 study. “Marketers need to know what audiences can be reached with these services, which companies — if any — are ready for prime time, and whether LBSNs [location-based social networks] align with business objectives. Forrester recommends that bold, male-targeted marketers start testing, but that most marketers should wait until they can get a bigger bang for their buck, when adoption rates increase and established players emerge from the fray.”

Wired.com obtained a copy of the report, which also concludes that the few people who are using Brightkite, Dopplr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Scvngr, StickyBits, Whrrl and other location-based social networks tend to influence their friends and family, making them good advertising targets. They tend to be young males with college degrees living in households that pull in an average of $105,000 per year, and are more likely than the typical online American to check their cellphones from a store for product information before making a big purchase — a big factor for marketers looking to sway buying decisions at brick-and-mortar stores.

Another key finding: Facebook and Twitter “are both in prime position to combine their mastery of social networking with mobile location.” Twitter appears to be in better shape in this regard, having launched TwitterPlaces in June, which lets people tag their tweets with their locations (and lets others view tweets associated with a given place by searching for that tag).

Facebook, on the other hand, appears to have blown it, for now anyway. The site’s recent privacy imbroglio, which became front-page news on mainstream publications due to the way it was handling (or mishandling) sensitive personal data, was timed horribly, according to the study, because users will only divulge their locations to services they feel will maintain high privacy standards.