In previous NST blog posts, we discussed the pros and cons of two new Twitter advertising products for businesses: Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets.

We noted the major downfall of Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets is neither make sense for most small businesses, as these Twitter ad products are not geographically focused.  This is disappointing because small business owners have found great success using Twitter. In a recent article on Mashable, several small business owners discuss why Twitter is a big win for small businesses. The small business owners said Twitter helps them to find people who are interested in their products, to create a dialogue with their customers and to create conversations around their products/services without appearing too promotional.

Twitter announced about a month ago that it would in fact be offering Twitter ads to local businesses. These ads should have the ability to be delivered based on location. This is great news for small businesses especially now that Twitter’s Promoted Tweets will soon appear in our personal Twitter streams.

Offering a location-based ad product is a smart move by Twitter, not only because Twitter can target small business owners, but also because $12.1 billion has been spent on online advertising in the first half of 2010 (up 13.9 percent from the second quarter of 2009).

Small business owners who advertise on Twitter would benefit from an ad model that targets people based on their interests and location as the ads will put the company name in front of a very specific target market. And, as small business owners know, one of the benefits of using Twitter is connecting with people who are interested in your brand.