5 Best Practices for Local Business Marketing on Social Media

Becoming the “busiest restaurant on the street” is every local business owner’s dream.

And with customers being increasingly influenced by online reviews and social proof for their purchasing decisions, it’s never been as critical to master the skill of local business marketing as now.

By following simple, yet very effective local online marketing tactics, any local business owner can become successful, beat their competition, become a leading authority in their market, set new standards, have an impeccable online presence and become recession-proof.

The first best practice when it comes to local social media marketing, is looking for people who live close to the local business and who have already expressed an interest on social media about the products or service this local business provides. You can easily do so thanks to Twitter.

Simply login to your Twitter account and in the search box enter the following code in Twitter’s search box: “keyword” near:location within:km

For example, should you own a restaurant in Sydney and would like to start conversations with frequent Sydney restaurant goers to direct them to your business, you would type in: “eating out” near:Sydney within:2km

The search results will then list all the people who have stated in their profiles that they live in Sydney, and who have published in their tweets the keyword “eating out”.

If for example you own a gym, you can follow the same process, looking for people who have made statements on their social media account such as “I need to lose weight” or “I need to start going to the gym”.

The second best practice when it comes to local social media marketing, is to use Facebook ads. When you choose this option, you’ll have to decide which campaign objective to select among the 11 different campaign objectives available.

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The most common one to select for local business marketing is the “store traffic” campaign objective as it will allow you to market your business to local people. In order to use this campaign objective, you will need to add the details of your local business.

If you have multiple local businesses, Facebook will ask you to create a main Page that acts as an umbrella for all your local businesses. You’ll also be required to create a new Page for each business that you add.

Digital marketing agencies like twopalms.com.au specialize in helping brands leverage the power of Facebook ads and setting up their local business page and campaigns.

These local business Pages will be linked to your main Page and you’ll be able to manage them all from your main Page as well.

The third best practice when it comes to social media for local business is to customize and optimize your social media accounts. This is done by making sure that your banners are up to date and clearly explain what your local business provides, where it’s located, what sets it apart from other similar businesses and how people can get in touch.

To do so, start by updating your banners. Your banners should include pictures of your target audience, a headline stating what your local business offers, for example “Voted the best Italian restaurant in Sydney 5 years in a row” and stating your website URL.

Since Facebook allows you to have a video banner instead of a static image cover, it is important to leverage this feature to help promote your local business even further.

When creating your video for local online marketing, make sure you follow the size recommendation. Ideally, your cover video should be 820 x 462 pixels. In terms of the length, it should be from 20 seconds to 90 seconds long. 

If people view your video from a mobile device though, the sides of the video won’t show so make sure important elements such as text overlay are closer to the middle of the video so it’s not cut off when watched from a mobile device.

The video for local business marketing should include all the important information about your local business such as where you are located, what you offer, what sets you apart from similar local businesses and how people can get in touch.

Customize your social media accounts further for local online marketing by adding a profile picture that is 250 x 250 pixels. The profile picture can be your logo or a headshot of you if you are the face of the business.

The fourth best practice when it comes to social media for local businesses is to publish posts about your local business on a regular basis. Your posts should not just be about promoting your local business but also publishing posts about your customers and your special events.

For example, if you own a restaurant and it has been booked for someone’s birthday party, make sure you publish posts about how you’ve decorated the restaurant for the special occasion, and publish posts of the guests too.

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You can even tag the guests on the pictures, so their friends get to see the post too and you can really benefit from word-of-mouth. If you’ve booked special entertainment at your local business such as a band, you can publish posts about the band setting up the stage or publish video posts of them rehearsing.

If you own a clothing store, you can publish pictures of new arrivals and give people a sneak peek into the new season fashion trends.

The fifth best practice when it comes to social media for local businesses is leveraging influencers.

Influencers are people who have large and engaged audiences as well as authority and credibility. What this means is you can ask an influencer to market your local business.

When using influencers as part of your social media for local business strategy, you can either pay them a flat fee, or commissions or negotiate something else to make it a win-win situation for both you and the influencer.

Chloe Morello for example, is an influencer in the beauty and makeup industry and is often hired to market local beauty salons and spas. She will publish pictures of her on social media enjoying beauty treatments at local beauty clinics.

In order to identify online influencers to run social media for local businesses campaigns, you can start by performing a simply Google search. For example, should you want to find influencers in the makeup industry, look for “makeup tutorial blogs”.

Once on the blog, make sure it is being updated regularly and that the content is aligned with the values of your brand. If the blog is being updated regularly, that means it’s still active.

If so, explore the person’s social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. Should their audience size, video views and engagement rate be much higher than the average audience size of social media users in your industry, you could consider partnering with them to promote your local business.

The sky is the limit with how many people you can start directing to your local business when implementing this social media for local business strategy.

If you’d like to take your Facebook marketing to the next level, and increase the results you’re getting from your current Facebook marketing efforts by 10, click here to download my FREE Facebook marketing report. Simply enter your name and email and I’ll instantly send you the report.

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About the Author

Corinna Essa

Corinna Essa is known internationally as the go-to person when it comes to social media marketing.

Corinna owns a social media marketing company helping businesses around the world leverage the power of social media without doing any of the legwork. Her company has been featured in many media outlets including Sky Business news, Working Women magazine, Ymagazine, Tasmanian Times, Channel 7 and 101fm.

Corinna is also the author of 2 bestselling books “Money On Demand – The 16 Fastest Ways to Becoming a Millionaire Online” and “Reach: The SECRETS to converting your social media audience into your network marketing downline fast”