JD Rucker: You Know Your Area. Use that Knowledge on Social Media.

Monday, July 8, 2013

You Know Your Area. Use that Knowledge on Social Media.

If there’s one thing that gets under my skin the most about local businesses on social media, it’s that they rarely take advantage of one of the most important types of posts: local facts. It’s a low-hanging fruit that is completely missed by most.

It starts with having a local following and fan base, of course, but if your page is in what we like to call stage 2, then local facts are an easy way to get people talking to your and about you. It’s one of the most important tools in our arsenal that we use to promote clients but it doesn’t take a team of social media specialists to make it happen. You can do it very easily on your own.

In the example above, you see this Long Beach Chevy dealer has a post up about an interesting fact for the Long Beach area. Someone saw it in their news feed, recognized it, then tagged their friend in a comment. The friend saw the post as a result and commented as well. He recognized the house in this case… it was his neighbor!

The individual interaction has an exceptional algorithmic effect on Facebook. Whenever anyone likes, comments, or shares a post, it has an opportunity to be seen by that person’s friends. When something like this happens where two friends are having an exchange on the post, the chances of their individual friends seeing the post increases, of course, but the chances of their shared friends seeing it shoot up exponentially. Once one of those friends like the post, now it’s very likely that their entire shared circle of friends will see the post.

This is a great thing because chances are very high that the majority of the people within this circle are within the market area of the dealership. That’s one of the ways the Facebook algorithm works. It’s one of the easiest ways to get posts like this to be liked by 30 local people and seen by over 1000 locals.