Location based Social Media applications have the greatest potential to benefit small business. Why?
Services like Foursquare, and (shortly) Facebook, bring what’s happening in your immediate vicinity to life. These location-based apps let users “check in” (using their mobile phone) at businesses like yours and write reviews and tips.
Small businesses can feed deals and promotions to those in the area and to frequent repeat visitors when they check in on their phone. This brings small business an unprecedented marketing opportunity for local, time-sensitive, and geo-targeted advertising and promotion.
Now is the time for savvy local businesses to become aware of location based services, how they work, and to prepare to implement them.
Ways that location based social media benefit your business:
- Increase overall sales.
- Develop foot traffic.
- Attract patronage on specific days or at specific times.
- Promote certain products.
- Improve custom retention and attract new customers.
Promotional campaigns ideas:
- Contests where every person who checks in has a chance to win a free product.
- Special offers for those patrons who check in the most frequently. An example is a free coffee or dessert for a restaurant or coffee shop.
- Incentives such as check-in 10 times this month to receive a free gift.
- Goal specific discounts, like 15% off on Tuesdays or $2.00 from 2-4pm.
Compelling details:
- Facebook, which now has 400+ million regular users (compared with Foursquare’s 1+ million) will unveil its location aware implementation any day. This will be the event that causes location based services to attain wide-spread popularity and become an every day use technology.
- Foursquare, which attained 1 million users faster than Twitter, continues to build steam, add new business deals and demonstrate how the technology works in real life. Most recently they struck a deal with Financial Times to give the most frequent visitors at locations they deem important the opportunity to unlock free premium subscriptions. Competitor Gowalla’s demise may be near at hand, which is what happened to Twitter’s early competitors.
- Mobile is key. These new technologies primarily revolve around mobile phones and applications run on them.
- Local mobile advertising based on location awareness will be huge.
- Watch for other types of location aware services, such as Double Dutch. Imagine attendees or hotel guests for example, using your private location app to share their onsite experiences, tips and reviews while seeing what other guests or attendees are doing.
- Integration of your social graph and location awareness. Currently you need to recreate all of your online social relationships be they from Facebook or Twitter on a service like Foursquare.
What should you do now? Become involved. While we’re awaiting Facebook’s fore into the mobile space, start using Foursquare today to begin to understand the location aware social space and how its technologies works.
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