Understanding where your customers are can reveal a lot about your organization. Courtesy of Scott Chan via FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Location-based social media monitoring can help companies organize the huge amount of social media data and understand what customers are saying about their brands. By filtering posts by location, brands can organize and measure conversations by location and pinpoint interested consumers.
While specialized geo-targeting tools exist, PR and marketing professionals can use their social media monitoring and measurement service to transform location data into actionable business insights. Location-based social media monitoring enables marketers to engage consumers in airports, sports arenas, hospitals, universities and malls.
Many Posts Lack Keywords and Hashtags
Organizations typically search social media through keywords and hashtags. But many social media posts lack the keywords or hashtags organizations are tracking. Research by Geofeedia shows that about three-quarters of social media posts lack relevant hashtags or keywords. In fact, some posts contain only images or videos with no text at all.
During the last Super Bowl, NCAA tournament, and even the Social Media Marketing World conference, almost a third of social media posts did not have the event hashtag, writes R.J. Talyor of Geofeedia in a Convince & Convert blog post.
Location-based social media data can help organizations in many ways:
Event marketing and monitoring. Event organizers can obtain honest feedback from their event attendees by monitoring social media conversations. They can learn what speakers, entertainment, materials, and venues were popular – or not.
Sharing customer posts. Location-based data can let companies find content that’s ideal to share — for instance, photos of your customers enjoying your product. Bud Light used this technique to find customers at sports stadiums.
Competitive intelligence. Location-based data can help marketers obtain information of competitors’ products or services and monitor the competition. They can learn from conversations how to improve their marketing, customer service, and operations. Hotels and airlines are among the types of brands that can use this strategy.
Lead generation. Marketers can join the conversation at customers’ decision-making moments, and track social data to target users based on urgency, interest, and proximity.
Find new keywords. Location-based listening can reveal keywords you might not have considered. Marketers may learn that customers in their stores refer to their brands as well as to competitors by nicknames. They can then add the names to their keyword lists.
Identify high demand areas. Filter conversations by locations to pinpoint where social media conversations about the company or its competitors are most active. A company may decide to boost marketing efforts in areas seeing high demand for its products.
Discover regional trends. PR and marketing teams can learn which products and trends are most popular in each region and optimize campaigns accordingly.
Report local events. Local and small businesses can also benefit from location data. For example, a local business could add the local and regional newspapers to its media monitoring database and receive news about upcoming community events that it may want to sponsor or participate in.
Bottom Line: Filtering social media monitoring by location adds a powerful dimension to social media listening. Organizations that use their media monitoring service to organize and measure data by location can discover a wealth of new information about the brand and its customers’ needs.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
