Social Media Can Be a Powerful Tool for Local Franchise Marketing

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Whether you’re a franchisor or the owner of a local franchise, if you’re interested in learning more about social media marketing, let’s take a look at how to get results, it’s role in PR and how to measure the effectiveness of a social strategy:

Getting Results from Social Media

One of the most common hesitations business owners of all types have is being able to generate real results. Many business owners are worried that they’re not going to generate any tangible results from the time and effort they invest in.

While that is a valid concern, the good news is there are proven ways to ensure that social-media usage will lead to actual business results. The first step in this process is to identify the most important social networks for a specific business. While it’s useful to have a presence on all the major social sites, chances are that one or two will drive the majority of results.

Once you determine where to focus your efforts, the other most important component is to stay consistent. The most common reason that businesses fail to see the type of results they want is they don’t stick with it. Although it can take a little time to start building momentum, consistently posting and engaging will lead to measurable results.

What’s the Connection Between Social Media and PR?

Local franchise owners know just how much they can gain from targeted local media coverage. What’s great is it can work very well for supporting traditional PR efforts. Not only is social-media a great way for a local franchise to promote any news coverage they get, but it can also be very useful for reaching out to local media contacts and building relationships that lead to coverage.

How to Measure the Effectiveness of a Social Media Strategy

Although it can be a little tricky to attribute exactly how many leads or new customers you generate through social-media, there are still plenty of ways to measure the effectiveness of a marketing strategy. One of the best is to look at what kind of traffic different updates drive. By using an analytics program to see what visitors do once they arrive at your website, you’ll be able to see what kind of content does the best job of attracting engaged visitors. This information will be very useful for guiding your future efforts you will invest in social marketing.

This is the syndicated copy of an original article posted at Web Strategy Plus.

Location-Based Internet Marketing is the Future!

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When talking about the online marketing trends for 2010, most marketers have predicted location trends will be the future! Location-based Internet marketing is of great importance both for your search engine optimisation and social media marketing strategy.

Using location-based Internet marketing in search engine marketing strategy has become very important for businesses these days. Location-based navigation is greatly used among search engines and mobile device makers. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing are already using location features as to help you narrow down the results to the searcher’s country. They are looking to localize Web searching as to make it more relevant for the searcher and draw more regional advertising. It is also predicted that GIS Latitude and Longitude coordinates within web sites will soon become an absolute necessity for everyone performing e-commerce via the Internet.

Location-based Internet marketing is becoming increasingly important also for your social media marketing strategy! Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Yelp. WordPress. YouTube. Foursquare. Gowalla. Myspace. Constant Contact. They are all content-generating platforms that focus to some extent on location features. Facebook allows you to be part of a location-based networked (e.g. London, New York) and to search people based on their location. LinkedIn also allows you to specify your location as to make it possible for professionals from the same region to search you. The location feature is available for most social networks and they are all working as to improve it!

Two of the social networks which have taken their location-based feature to a new level, are Twitter and Foursquare. At the very beginning of 2010 Twitter introduced a location trend feature that allows users to follow local trending topics on Twitter. It is a great way to find out what people are talking about around the world and has got a great feedback from users.

Another social network that specialises on the use of location is Foursquare. Identified by Mashable as ‘the future Twitter’, Foursquare is a location-based service based on your Twitter network with an added layer of social game play.

Importance of Foursquare for Businesses:

* Use it to explore your neighbourhood and then reward people for doing so. It combines their friend-finder and social city guide elements.
* Use it as a game mechanics – users can earn points, win mayorships and unlock badges for trying new places and revisiting old favourites.

Location-based Internet marketing is one of the hottest trends at the moment and can be used very effectively by both small and larger businesses. When designing your social media marketing strategy and search engine marketing strategy, this new feature should be included. Please share with us your experience with location-based Internet marketing! We look forward to reading your opinions!