In this day and age it is extremely important for large multi-location businesses and small local businesses to understand the need for a local digital marketing strategy. This ensures that a brand's various locations can be found easily online, which in turn, will generate local leads. Businesses should also go further and create a unique local strategy specifically for social media. It’s not a new idea that social networks prefer localized content and consider this content more relevant than other content. There are several ways to get down to the local level on social networks; we will be focusing on Facebook today, more specifically Facebook targeting.
Build A Social Page for Every Location
Having a local social strategy is just as important to larger multi-location brands as it is to small local businesses. It is best to build a pages for each of the brand's locations and link that page back to the location’s website. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook, are prime platforms for a local social strategy, especially with Facebook’s new Nearby and Graph Search.
This type of strategy can be difficult due to time constraints, scalability challenges, lack of important resources, and concerns about controlling a brand's message. Brands can use one of several platforms to automate many of these social tasks, however some brands might not be ready to make that investment. Businesses which are not ready to invest in an automation tool should still localize their social content.
Get Your Message to the Right People
It is very important for brands to integrate geo-targeting tools in order to push localized content to their respective networks. Facebook is one social network that has a built in post-targeting tool. If used correctly it can improve a brands exposure and increase engagement.
Some brands have Facebook pages with thousands or even millions of likes. At this very moment Wal-Mart has over 32 Million likes. These fans are from all over the world; they speak different languages and will relate to all types of different subjects. One single message on a social media site will not be as impactful as several messages or posts that are hyper-targeted to specific geographic and demographic audience segments.
Facebook's Targeting Tool
The great thing about Facebook targeting is that it allows brands to customize and localize their message to any audience they desire. This increases the likelihood of engagement, because their message is more relevant. As your brands engagement goes up, your exposure goes up, because each engagement will create a story that can possibly reach the Facebook feed of that user’s friends.
The higher the engagement a post receives the better the chance Facebook will include that post in the news feed. According to recent Facebook statistics, approximately 15 – 20% of a brand's fans will see a single post in their feed. This is why localizing content is so important because it will help boost engagement, which will increase the odds of your brand reaching more fans.
The Facebook targeting tool allows brands to target posts by: Relationship status, Age, Language, Gender, Educational Status, Interested in (men/women), and/or Location (Region/State/City/Country). If a brand has several locations and does not have a page for each location, being able to target a post provides an easy and effective solution to putting the right messages in front of the right audience.
As you can see it is very important for brands to target their Facebook posts to a specific audience. Twitter is another great social network that can use geo-targeting and is something we will discuss more in a future blog post. Contact one of our social media experts today to help your brand target the correct audience.
