Share your location through Tag

Tag! You’re It!

Tag is just one of the latest apps for iOS that allows you to share your location with your friends. This allows for fast and easy communication between friends while out and about on the town. Apps like Foursquare, Find My Friends and SocialRadar broadcast your location to anyone and anybody on your newsfeed, which is a little creepy if you ask me, but unlike its app counterparts, Tag can actively and very selectively share your location with your friends without making it feel too public or evasive.

To use the app all you have to do is simply login with Facebook and “tag” your friends with a combination of your location, text, photos and video. The concept behind this app is that if you are just bored, sitting at a bar, going to the movies, you can invite some friends to join you. You can also pre-select a list or tap on individual names to send them a message and let them know where you are.

The whole point of the app is to eliminate the common text you receive from your friend on a typical Saturday night like, “Hey, where are you?” “Hey, what’s up?” Tag makes sharing your location fun, easy and memorable. Tag also is working with brands and hoping that they will use the service to interact with fans around specific events and locations.

Its layout is clean and simple but has a striking resemblance to Snapchat. My first time using Tag I found that it had a lot of bug issues that need to addressed.  However, I feel the app would have maximized its usefulness if it displayed some sort of intro video on how to properly use and also display a guide that demonstrates to you how to post a picture and share it with your friends. Considering how sensitive location data is, Tag and other location sharing apps need to think of a better way to educate future users of the app and provide further information on how they will use their data.

Aside from all the bug issues, Tag is actually a great idea for an app. How many times have you been at a concert, bar or event and lost friends? It’s convenient for finding your friends and it’s also great for getting people to attend events. Usually, people don’t want to go places they believe will be a waste of time, right? So why not take an awesome picture and show all your friends what they’re missing!

Another question you may be asking yourself is how can us marketers use this to our advantage?

A consumer sharing their location is another gateway that will give us a better insight into the lives of our audience. It will provide us with an enormous amount of information like, what kind of places your target audience likes to visit, what kind of music they listen to etc. To me, a picture is worth a thousand words and as marketers and advertisers we are not only able to imagine our consumers, but now we can see exactly what they look like. If anything, apps like Snapchat and Tag are just giving us a better visual of our potential audience.

Patricia Ferreira, Raven5 Ltd, Oakville, Ontario April 2014

 

 

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