In a recent podcast, my colleague Kevin Mullett talked about a common problem that many of our clients experience, which I’ll paraphrase as:
We have 100 locations. Bob manages our Boston location. Sally manages our Sacramento location. On social media, their locations are massively successful. Bob and Sally are outgoing people. They love social media and use it in their personal lives, too. The problem is, we don’t have 98 other location managers that are nearly as awesome as Bob and Sally. What do we do for our other 98 locations in Anchorage, Miami, Honolulu, etc.?
At the moment, as Kevin joked in the podcast, our client unfortunately can’t clone Bob and Sally.
Yet there are several tangible things that a multi-location business can do to take Bob and Sally’s best social media posts, and deploy them across the social media channels of other locations. To achieve that, though, you’ll need some efficiencies and some technology.
My coworker Kevin Mullett is Vice President of Program Services here at MarketSnare. Since he’s also in charge of our socials for clients, I also think of him as our Director of Visibility and Social Media, and our Multi-location Marketing and SEO Consultant.
A brilliant point that Kevin made in our podcast episode was: Local consumers often know exactly what they’re going to buy. The thing that’s even more important, though, is who they’re going to buy it from. In local social media, that’s why connection is so important.
With that in mind, here are four quick ways a business owner or manager can really connect with their local community on social media:
1. Celebrate your local sports teams, schools, parks, restaurants, etc. on your social channels.
2. Join online local communities and online local groups.
3. Use local hashtags in your posts.
4. Connect with and follow other local businesses on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
Thanks for reading. Be sure to check out our full conversation about local social media with Kevin.