Web searches continue to increase in sophistication, with results often mirroring exactly the information a customer needs. If someone wants to find a great restaurant nearby, search algorithms can immediately determine that person’s approximate location and deliver results to match. Even social media searches have gradually moved toward location-based results. A search for restaurants on Facebook, for instance, brings a combination of pages for nearby restaurants and check-ins at local restaurants by friends.
Whether your business is local or brick-and-mortar, it’s important to pay attention to the location of your website and social media visitors. By knowing more about the geography behind your followers, you can target your marketing appropriately. Here are a few ways to gather regional information on your social media likes, retweets, and follows and put that information to use in your business.
Gather and Analyze Information
With so many tech tools now available, you can easily monitor social media likes by location. Using a potent dashboard for social media can help you keep tabs on all your social media analytics and data as well as help you with sending out reports and monitoring the entire campaign in one place. You can also monitor the geographic location of your Twitter followers. You can study this information over time to determine whether you’re engaging the customers you need to reach, whether you’re focusing on customers in a specific town or trying to expand your geographic reach.
Set a Presence
One of the most important things your business can do is to connect a location to any social media profile you create, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or another popular platform. In addition to specifying your location in your account settings, mention it in your bio, as well, to ensure that when customers search for businesses in your area, your social media profiles will show up.
Geotag Your Posts
You can further strengthen your location visibility by making sure to include a location on each of your posts. If you have a brick-and-mortar shop, encourage visitors to check in, which will further tag the location of your business on your page. You can do this by merely posting a reminder or by incentivizing check-ins by offering a discount or entry into a contest. If you set up a photo opportunity at your location, you’ll likely find many customers snap a picture while visiting, tagging the location when they post it on their various sites. In addition to further establishing your location, it will help spread the word about your business to customers who may not already know about you.
Encourage Reviews
Local businesses can benefit from customer reviews on sites like Yelp. First you’ll need to claim your business on the site if you haven’t already, which will give you the ability to respond to any reviews posted there. You can then begin encouraging reviews by adding badges to your website and requesting signage to display at any locations you have. Ask your most loyal customers to leave reviews to get your page started and you’ll likely soon find that the reviews start rolling in.
Use SEO
In addition to tagging your location with your posts, you can also boost your search visibility by incorporating the relevant cities into your posts. Try to slip a city name into the updates you add to various platforms on at least an occasional basis. If you have a small number of local storefronts and want to rank well for those areas, consider setting up separate social media and Yelp profiles for each location, incorporating the same geolocation tagging with each page.
Consistently Monitor
Your analytics shouldn’t stop once you’ve deployed your location-based social media strategy. You should put solutions in place to make sure your location-based efforts are succeeding, then adjust your strategy accordingly. If you’re an online retailer seeking a national customer base, you can use analytics to determine areas of the country that aren’t currently interacting with your social media sites and find ways to reach out to them. Analytics will then let you watch whether those new efforts are working.
Location matters, even for online retailers. To learn more about your customers’ locations and find ways to reach out to new ones, put the right tools and strategies in place. Over time, you can tweak those strategies and come up with an online presence that will help your company grow.
