Social Media Geelong: target your local market online

With Facebook about to hit it's 100 billion users mark, Twitter at 140 million and LinkedIn hosting a page for every Fortune 500 company, many business owners are feel like they are tiny mice trying to roar like lions.  The masses are there, milling around, spending copious hours engaging with their online communities each week, but how do businesses make themselves heard, and how to the engage users and harness the power of social share?  Start small by targeting nano-markets.  What are nano-markets you may ask?  A nano-market is like pointing laser at a niche marketing and pinpointing a group with specific interests within the niche market.  Targeting highly motivated audiences, and having few competitors doing the same, can result in incredible ROI.

The introduction of hyper-local search combined with targeted social media strategies have made it easier than ever to reach these nano-niches.

Why Social Media Geelong?

Some businesses are global.  They send goods world-wide or offer services to the world online, and for those businesses the internet has been an obvious choice since day one.  Others deal with the domestic market, shipping goods interstate, and again, e-commerce a given as part of their marketing strategy.  And what about businesses targeting local customers?  It there really a need for local businesses to be online if their target market is living locally?  If you can find ways to meet your target market where and when they choose to interact, you’ll get more chances to be their go-to provider.  Considering the sheer numbers of people of all ages using social media, and the amount of time they are on social media sites each week, it would be remiss of businesses large or small, global or local, not to include social media in their marketing mix.


For businesses with a specifically local market, for example restaurants, bars, or local firms, or multiple branches or outlets in different geographic locations, geo-targeted social media marketing is essential.  A marketing strategy which is not geo-targeted, in such circumstances, can be inefficient and ineffective.  Putting valuable resources into a broad and non-targeted online marketing strategy can result in time and money being tipped into marketing your local Geelong restaurant to the world, rather than your local community.  There is no sense in that.

Geo targeting and geo-marketing

Geo-targeting is determining the location of a website visitor and determining different content based on their location.  Geo-marketing involves delivering digital content via geo-location software, to potential customers who you have targeted based on physical location and associated interests.

There are a number of free tools available, two of the most popular being Twitter Search and FourSquare.

One of the best ways to delve into location based searches on Twitter is by using the “Advanced” search option.  This feature enables a search of users tweeting about topics in your industry, niche or nano-niche, and who are in a specific geographic location.  And the greatest thing is, you can engage them immediately, following them, conversing with them, and converting them to followers of your business.  Not only can you win follows directly, but if you can pinpoint influential bloggers in your specified location, you can win over influencers who in turn can champion your brand.

FourSquare, a Social Media Platform which requires users to "check in" to a place with their mobile phone and rewards the users with the highest numbers of check0ins, by crowning them Mayor.  This can be used by local businesses to incentivise and reward local patrons to be frequent guests.  It can also be used as a listening device monitor your local competitors, and market to their customer base. Provide special offers which will be visible to patrons when they check in to your business or business in your area.
Geo Marketing on Facebook

A valuable feature on Facebook is Geo marketing using your status update.  To do this, enter your status update (make your update relevant and specific to the areas you are targeting).  Just to the bottom of the right of the status field is a down arrow and the word “Public”.  Click on this and select the option “Location/Language”, then you can enter your target country or language.  For this example we are targeting based on location, so enter the desired country, and select either everywhere, state/province or city, and fill in the place names accordingly.

Use these tools to target your nano-market, stepping away from the online spaces saturated with the big brands.  Targeting smaller groups with specific interests which gel well with your brand identity may well put you on the road to stunning results.