Tag Archives: Media

Social Media

How to Go Local with Social Media

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by Debbie A. Everson

Is there a place for a small neighborhood business like yours in global sites Twitter or Facebook? Business wise, is there an advantage? Of course, there is. The beauty of online marketing through social media is that it gets your sales pitch to everybody. This means that you can launch a local social media campaign to attract local customers, with the help of these global-catering sites.

Successful Local Social Media Stories

Here are a few of the entrepreneurial spirits that grew their business with the help of ingenious local social media campaigns:

1. Mars Cafe. They employed Twitter and MySpace to establish an easy-going relationship with Iowa University customers. A “Twitter Tuesday” promo for students and teachers is claimable with a school ID. $1-coffee offers can be claimed when customers know the keyword posted earlier at Twitter.

2. Expedia. Online travel booking company Expedia is operating globally but maintains numerous local accounts. Expedia Chicago tweets the best round trip deals to and from Chicago every day. Twitter customers also get last minute travel and hotel deals that are cheaper than standard rates.

3. Studio Movie Grill. This Dallas-based cinema house operates an online ticket reservation system. They use Facebook and Twitter for local social media campaigns filled with announcements on special movie screenings and promos.

4. Dunkin Donuts. Their local campaigns are a mix of corporate- and branch-level Facebook offerings. Customers get a close look inside their kitchens, learn about their chefs, and receive a steady dose of news on local stores everywhere.

Best Places to Conduct Your Local Social Media Campaign

Social media sites may be the microcosm of the world, but they actually cater to local online marketing. Here are some of them and how they can help localize your campaign:

1. Facebook

Every user that signs up in Facebook fills in profile information. The city or hometown part of the profile is useful in local marketing. Your business’s Facebook account automatically places you in the same network with users of the same location, city or hometown.

2. LinkedIn

Business people use LinkedIn to get connections with businesses in the same location or industry. Your product, skill or service gains wider local coverage. LinkedIn users are potential business partners, employees or customers.

3. Twitter

Twitter’s near-real-time and conversational tweet feature allows businesses to directly reach out to local customers. It has a search facility that returns users in particular locations, depending on the search keywords used.

Tracking Local Social Media Gains

To ensure that your local social media campaign is really helping your business and is not a complete waste of time, here are some things to do:

1. Set a goal. This may vary from reaching out to costumers, or increase online sales, or simply monitor brand popularity online. Goals serve as the baseline to track the progress of your local social media campaign.

2. Track your milestones. A quarter later, did you achieve your goal to get a thousand Facebook fans, for example? Take stock of your current progress relative to the past, to maintain direction or make corrections when necessary.

3. Use tools to measure performance. It can be Google Analytics to measure traffic, or a PR checker, or a customer satisfaction survey form.

4. Keep at it. Local social media benefits are not gained overnight. Followers, fans and your entire customer base are carefully nurtured with patience and through time.

Remember that there is no such thing as instant success in local social media campaigns. Good business sense plus a well-crafted campaign will be instrumental in increasing your business reputation and engaging customers online.

About the Author

Debbie A. Everson, CEO SearchMar.com, experienced SEO Consultants and Search Engine Optimization Agency to over 2,000 small businesses. Learn about search engine marketing, pay-per-click, social bookmarking, and email marketing at our SEO Blog. Follow us on Twitter @searchmar or call 866.885.6263 to speak to an SEO Consultant.

Local SEO

Forget the Yellow Pages; It’s All About Local Search

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by Collyn Floyd

With yellow pages being out of date before they’re even off the printing press, it’s no surprise that Local Search on the Web has taken the place of dusty old “yellows” as the preferred method for finding local products and services.

Local Search allows you to generate search results by neighborhood, city, state, or zip code. It’s ideal for physicians, dentists, contractors, realtors, restaurants, retailers, or any businesses that serve customers/clients who come from a limited geographic region.

For example, if you’re a Northeast Ohio-based orthodontist, most likely your patients are also going to be from Northeast Ohio. Your primary objective should be gaining search engine rankings in the immediate region because that’s your “bread and butter”. A patient seeking orthodontic help in California isn’t going to do you much good, but one in Akron is a potential new customer.
Even if you need to have a national presence in the search engines, it still may be important for you to have a local presence. We’re a Canton Web Design and SEO firm. While we serve clients across the country, the majority of our clients come from a 50 mile radius. So while we don’t limit our Web Marketing to Local Search techniques, it’s critical that we have a strong presence in the local search results.
How Local Search Works

There are three ways to go about searching for local results. First, you can use a local search engine such as Google Local, Yahoo! Local, or http://www.local.com. Second, you can use an Internet yellow pages site such as yellowpages.com or superpages.com. Third, you can use a regular search engine like Google, but use geo-modifiers, such as “Canton, Ohio Web Design”.
Local Search Benefits

Local Search isn’t just convenient for users; it’s also loaded with benefits for the businesses being listed. Here are a few of the benefits:

* Free or inexpensive local visibility and awareness
* Additional links to the site
* More visibility in the search engines
* More targeted traffic to the website
* More traffic to the brick-and-mortar store

Popular local sites

We’ve listed a few popular sites where you’ll want to make sure you create a listing. Of course, there are many more in addition to these, and your own community will have its own sites you’ll want to consider. These, however, are a good starting place:

* superpages.com
* Yahoo! Local
* Google Local/Google Maps
* yellowpages.com
* local.com
* citysearch.com

(Note: some of these sites charge a fee for inclusion.)
Local Search Best Practices

Getting effective local search results doesn’t just happen by virtue of having a website. You need to ensure your own site is in tip-top shape by following a few best practices. Be sure to put your address on the Contact page of your website and any other appropriate pages. You’ll also want to explain on your site how your business relates to the community. If you serve on any local committees or board or have any local media mentions, you’ll want to be sure to mention this on your site. Finally, be sure to spell out state names (OH Web Design vs Ohio Web Design).
Social Media and Local Search

With Social Media sites absolutely exploding with new users, it’s no surprise that some Social Media sites are offering Local Search options to help people connect within their local communities:

* Facebook – network with others from your hometown
* Flickr – join one of Flickr’s photo-sharing groups, many of which are location-specific
* Twitter – use the advanced feature to do a geo-search for local members
* LinkedIn – look for and network with professionals in your area

Recap

With Local Search making up anywhere from 60-75% of all Internet searches, there’s no question that Local Search is crucial if you have a geo-specific business.

When it comes to Web Marketing, local businesses actually have certain advantages over businesses with a national presence. Instead of having to compete on a national scale, local businesses can focus their web marketing efforts on a more targeted geographic area and even find success a bit easier.

About the Author

Collyn Floyd is a marketing and public relations specialist with The Karcher Group, a web development and search engine marketing firm based in North Canton, OH. She is passionate about helping The Karcher Group’s clients achieve greater online traffic, leads and sales through search engine optimization and marketing.

Social Media

Facebook – A New Marketing Avenue

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by Brian Whitbread

Facebook and Social Media – The Next Marketing Opportunity

Marketing as an activity is all about reaching the right customers with the right products, and the result sought is delighted customers who are more than willing to open their purses wide enough to boost your revenues. For many years, marketers stalked their target customers through various means and by trying to get their message across to spread awareness about their wares.

Traditional Means of Communication

Traditionally, marketing communications were conducted via print, broadcast and such traditional media through disruptive advertising, where advertisements appear in between the content of interest for the customer.

Traditional media does give a large reach to a marketer with its programming of mass appeal. However, the wastage is equally high, since a large portion of the audience would belong to a different segment than the one that is to be targeted by the marketer.

Enter Social Media and the Internet

The revolution stirred by the internet as a medium took place because of the fact that it is highly personalized and provides more content on-demand than any other available medium. Social sites proliferated far and wide in their usage for a few simple reasons:

The power to create and distribute content is equally available to every user, irrespective of him/her being a customer or a marketer. In the earlier forms of media, that power rested with the editorial staff of the channel or the advertiser, but hardly ever with the user. The medium is completely personalized, and a user can create or join groups and further create content based on what he/she likes. Opinions are free and fair. This is one reason why social media is of utmost concern to marketers, since buying decisions are no more influenced as much by advertisements. The traditional word-of-mouth marketing approach has grown leaps and bounds on social networks.

Facebook – At the Center of Social Media

With 500 million (and growing) unique users worldwide, Facebook is the number one social networking site in terms of activity and subscriptions. What started as a garage initiative by Mark Zuckerberg has now become the biggest phenomenon on the internet.

A user interface that allows for quick communication and the ability to create fan pages and groups at the click of a mouse button are what make Facebook extremely popular. Another important reason for its immense popularity is the wide variety of social applications that have been developed and made available within the Facebook environment.

These applications can allow users and friends to do joint activities like playing games that run endlessly, sharing photos, videos, and web links, and many more.

How does this help a marketer?

Traditionally, media plans were drawn to include television channels, publications, or any other media that can grab maximum eyeballs and effectively reach a selected target audience. The science of segmentation and targeting has become only more accurate in the case of social media.

Facebook provides a wide variety of avenues to communicate with the audience, which opens up an entirely different world of possibilities to have a fruitful dialogue with customers. Some of these methods used popularly by marketers are:

Advertising: The first opportunity, which is the most obvious one, is advertising on Facebook. The difference, however, is the fact that you can create your own advertisement in a matter of minutes and also specify the details of your target group in terms of demographics and types of discussions where you want your advertisement to appear. Fan Pages: Facebook allows every brand, as well as individual users, to create fan pages for their favorite celebrities and their own homegrown businesses. Large brands have also created their official pages on Facebook that have a huge, immediate fan following around the world. The fan page has immense utility to convey first hand information about the brand and also to collect immediate and frank feedback from your customers. Branded applications: One of the most effective ways to engage a user toward your brand is by creating an application; this could be a game or a contest, with your branding coming across subtly through it.

What makes Facebook even more exciting is the way it allows you to target your communication sharply just to the customer segment you want to attract. It also provides analytics and page insights that give good feedback and measurement on the activity done.

The options provided by Facebook can be creatively explored and used judiciously for bringing about maximum benefits to any brand.

However, while doing all this, you need to be aware of the fact that customers have an equal say and have the ability to respond immediately to any of your actions with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Availing the service of a social media consultant to work out a social media strategy may be required so that your efforts will not be in vain.

Get more information here for the best Facebook training available: http://tinyurl.com/Action-On-Facebook

About the Author

Internet Marketing Development Practitioner