Data shows that the average person will spend almost 2 hours on social media every day. It has completely changed the ways that consumers and brands interact with one another.
For brands, social media has become a top avenue for creating awareness and engaging customers. For consumers, it’s a channel they often turn to for customer support, reviews and recommendations.
A new report from SOCi details the rise of “Localized Social Marketing,” which the company defines as, “Marketing efforts that focus on building a local presence for a business, leveraging locally-driven communication channels to reach the specific local communities it serves.” It addresses the importance of local-social marketing, as well as best practices.
According to SOCi customer data, over 70% of brand engagement on Facebook happens on local Pages. Additionally, Facebook Local Pages see nearly 2x the impressions of Brand Pages. Among other things, these local pages showcase customer reviews of individual branch or store locations. Facebook internal data shows a 1900% increase in the growth of local Business Pages since 2012.
Facebook is far and away the leading platform for localized social marketing, accounting for 4x more pages and profiles and 26x the engagement of the next social site. It is important to note however, that Facebook’s platform allows for brands to create multiple local pages, whereas other social networks do not.
SOCi recommends that brands shift focus from low-level engagements (likes, retweets) to high-level engagement actions, such as comments, shares and direct messages. The full report, which offers case studies, is available here (with registration).
LSA and SOCi also collaborated on two recent, related reports (registration also required):
