How To Leverage Social Media for Your Local Audience?
Social media has a wide reach, right? Facebook says that they have almost 1.4 billion users. That’s a tremendous reach. Even if you only reached 1 percent of them, that’d be significant. The problem is that you won’t likely reach 1 percent of them. Why? Because only half of those users visit Facebook every day and when they do, they’re bombarded with hundreds of competing messages.
Does that mean you should stop marketing on social media? Not. It’s relatively inexpensive and it does produce results. However, what you may want to do is reconsider your approach. One great way to maximize social media is to build very specific campaigns aimed at targeted markets – rather than marketing to the world, for example, you market to your community.
You can leverage the power of social media to reach a highly targeted and ready-to-buy local audience. Here are a few tips, ideas, and best practices.
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Local Keywords
- If you want local consumers to find you, it’s important to make it easy.
- Add keywords like your business name and location into your short and long page descriptions.
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Post about Local Events
- Talk about your community on Facebook. Share events.
- Brag about your community, post options, and editorial pieces, and attract other community members to your page.
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Reward Local
- Consider creating a campaign to drive locals to your social media pages.
- Give them an incentive. For example, you can create a local Facebook page. Enter all new “likes” into a drawing for free products or services.
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Connect and Comment
- Connect with other local business owners, customers, and community celebrities and leaders.
- Comment on their posts, share their news and get involved. They may reciprocate and begin commenting on and following your page too.
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Embrace the #hashtag
- When relevant, tag your posts and comments with local hashtags.
- It will help people find you and can create a sense of community.
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Get Visual
- People are more likely to share, like, and comment on social posts that are visual or contain visuals.
- Add photos to your posts.
- For example, are you sharing a post about the farmer’s market this weekend? Add a photo of the market as well.
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Promote Your Posts
- Facebook allows you to target your posts by choosing specific demographic data. There is a fee, so this is a tactic to use carefully and track your results.
- However, you can create specific posts and promotions and make sure that they get in front of the right people by choosing a local demographic audience for your information.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Google Plus offer you valuable opportunities to connect with your local audience via social media. Leveraging this tool to reach a local market is relatively straightforward. Create a strategy and start connecting.
Another way to utilize online tools to build a local audience is through review sites like Yelp and Google Places. Let’s explore what that means and look at some best practices.
