How brands can tap into social media’s missed opportunity
Too many brands maintain token social media presences, preferring to view it as just another conduit to advertise at people, rather than engaging with their audience. Cat Matson argues that brands have no excuse for failing to leverage the social tools that enable them to connect on a local, and even hyper local level.
Cat Matson of Hearis
It makes sense that social media eventually had to go back to local, personal conversations. What got us excited as Twitter and Facebook took off was the ability to 'connect' brands with their markets and facilitate two-way, or even 'omni-way' conversations. But as brands, in an attempt to maximise ROI started using social media as just another mass media advertising channel, their markets lost interest. Who wants to have a conversation with a faceless, nameless brand? Unless it's to complain or vent.
We're now seeing far greater engagement on localised social media channels - those social profiles that perhaps represent a store that's part of a larger network, or local, independent operators - where 'the market', aka 'people' prefer to engage with (shock, horror) with other people who represent the brands they love.
But that's just part of the story. With more and more web searches being done on mobile devices, search engines like Google are relying on local-data to return meaningful and useful results. But more significantly, Google want to return socially-informed results, not just websites that have been stuffed with the right amount of key words. So when you do a search on your mobile for say, coffee shop, dentist or even hotel, Google is going to not just look for raw data of options in your area, but also businesses that have good social credibility.
Corporate social media pages aren't enough anymore. At the very least, how do your customers 'check-in' socially on a corporate page? For years now people have asked me about why I 'check-in' everywhere on Foursquare. Personally it's because it creates a geo-rich history of the places I've been and enjoyed as well the places I want to check out in future. But far more significantly it's because I saw early on the data that Foursquare collects adds value to the apps and platforms I love - like maps.
When someone 'checks-in' on a social app - Google Places, Foursquare or Facebook, or even indirectly via a platform like Instagram, they’re adding to the data map of a city. That check-in data, along with reviews, comments and photos add to the socially informed story about a place. Those 'stories', in a data sense, inform search engines. But they also inform in the old-fashioned way of word-of-mouth - giving other users insights, stories and even pictures about the choices available to them in a given area.
But there’s more than just the search benefits. Conversationally, we see local social media profiles (e.g. Individual stores rather than the corporate brand) achieve 5x the reach and 8x the engagement of their non-local counterpart on Facebook. In a space where reach and engagement count, not just in terms of foot- or web-traffic, but also in terms of 'social-optimisation', stats like this can’t be ignored.
Facebook is certainly the most 'obvious' player to watch at the moment in the local-social space. With global users now at a billion and advertisers at a million, it still is 'king' when it comes to B2C brand awareness and engagement. Facebook's 'Graph Search' is still new, but it demonstrates Facebook's play into harnessing the mass amounts of socially informed geo-data to become a viable (personalised, socially-informed) search engine.
Google + and it's associated Places product are the epitome of why local-social is important. Try searching for 'ice-cream shop' on Google Maps on your phone. The pins you'll see will be 'Places' pins and data such as reviews will be pulled from G+ where possible. Many users discount Google + as a network citing lower numbers, but that's ignoring the fact that Google + is less a network and more a social layer across all of Google's properties. It's Google - as the number one search engine it's going to use data curated in its own properties first to return results.
Foursquare unfortunately has struggled to reach critical mass in Australia, but is huge in South East Asia, Russia and the US (35M users worldwide; 1.5M active business users). Many local pundits suggest Foursquare's time is limited based purely on local usage. Nothing could be further from the truth and savvy brands use Foursquare to promote 'check-in' specials and encourage loyalty, which in turn adds to that ever important data map.
Platforms like Yelp are worth keeping an eye on too, particularly if you like a more detailed ‘review’ in your search results ... and it’s informing iOS (Apple) maps results too.
Building a local-social media presence is key as the channel consolidates from ‘new’ to ‘part of the landscape’. Multi-location brands will do well to build their local as well as corporate profiles and local, ‘small’ businesses can still compete with the ‘big guys’ purely because social loves local.
Cat Matson (@catmatson) is a social-media strategist and CEO of HEARIS, a social media management system.