4 Ways National-Local Brands Can Win With Social Location Mobile

This is a variation of a post written for the Asia Pacific Centre for Franchising Excellence.

Location, Location, Location.  We’ve all heard this catch cry from real estate agents but in the land grab for online real estate, Facebook is taking location services very seriously with some exciting new developments for business, both large and small.

For quite a while, Traffika has talked about the strategic approach around the collision of Social Media, Location & Mobile (SoLoMo) and it appears our predictions are right with the worlds largest Social platform leading the way.

To put some perspective on just how quickly SoLoMo has reached scale in Australia, Facebook has almost 10.5 million active Australian users (Social). From this number, 6 million use Facebook on their mobile phone (Mobile). Currently there are approx. 10 million Facebook Places check-ins each month in Australia (Location). 

The really exciting part is Facebook Places gets such huge check-in numbers without incentivising people to check-in, people are checking in purely to let their friends know where they are, or to demonstrate their affinity to a local brand.


With the beta release of Facebook Deals coming to selected Australian advertisers this year, we can expect to see the rate of Facebook Places check-ins sky-rocket as customers have more and more reasons to check-in and get great deals.

For small businesses, this presents an awesome opportunity to easily compete with large established brands, and drive store foot traffic, social brand awareness and ultimately sales.

For large national brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, SoLoMo presents a new set of challenges.  We call this the National/Local dilemma.

National/Local brands need to maintain brand consistency and control promotions and messaging from a national perspective. While simultaneously providing timely and relevant offers and information at a local store level.
For example, a franchisor may have national campaigns, regional campaigns and individual franchisees will want to run local area promotions at their stores.  Franchisees will also want to connect with their local community via Facebook - for example, to talk about their sponsorship of a local sporting club.

Co-ordinating all of these and ensuring each franchisee maintains consistent brand standards is a difficult task.

Here are the Top 4 tips National/Local brands can do to win with SoLoMo:

1. Claim or create Facebook Places  for all of your locations. Ensure the format is standardised and they are linked to your main corporate Facebook page via a Parent/Child relationship.
2. Develop clear and consistent policies for your local network, area & store managers that define brand standards, communication and promotional guidelines. Then empower them with the right tools and training to interact with customers at a local level.
3. Segment & target your search marketing & social media advertising at a local level to ensure the most relevant offers are presented to your customers.
4. Claim or create Google Places Listings for all of your locations that are optimised with the correct geo-modified keywords. Then standardise the format and management of your Google Places Listings.  
   

Have you had any success with SoLoMo? We'd love to hear about. Just drop us a line in the comments below.

Matt is the Founder & Managing Director at Traffika. Follow him on Twitter @mattforman, or read more from Matt here.