Local Marketing on Other Social Networks

There are literally hundreds of social networks on which your business could engage with customers and prospects. You should prioritize your efforts based on where your audience is already asking you to engage.

Beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, there are a range of secondary sites that can all provide you with a steady stream of customers depending on how well you engage with them.

Foursquare

Foursquare is a social network that is first and foremost about location. Similar to Facebook, users follow friends on Foursquare and receive updates whenever these friends "check in" to a particular business or destination, sometimes posting a photo or a tip about the business when they do so.

Sign your business up for Foursquare at business.foursquare.com. The Foursquare database is used by both Pinterest and Instagram, making it particularly important to sign up, even if you don't think you'll ever use Foursquare. Users uploading photos to both of these services are prompted to add the location at which they were taken. So your business has the opportunity to gain extra free exposure on these sites if you're included in the Foursquare database.

After signing up you'll be able to post photos to your page, highlight any special events or discounts you want visitors to know about, and offer rewards to first-time or loyal Foursquare customers. Here are a few case studies of businesses successfully using Foursquare to get you started.

Instagram

With roughly 60,000,000 users in the U.S. alone, this popular photo service owned by Facebook has a substantial following. Conceptually, Instagram is a hybrid between Pinterest and Foursquare, where users' primary action is photography—often accompanied by their location.

Unsurprisingly, the best way to attract a following on Instagram is to post compelling photos. For more tips on using Instagram for your business, see this official resource page.

LinkedIn

Nearly 90,000,000 American adults are on LinkedIn—perhaps the most popular social network in B2B industries. If you're like most local business owners, you probably already have a LinkedIn personal account.

But you may not yet have a company page—go here to create one. Doing so allows you to create a hub for your employees and prospective employees, add photos of your business, tell other LinkedIn members about your business, and showcase posts from pretty much anywhere on the web. Browse for examples of successful LinkedIn Company Pages here.

Active participation in relevant groups can also be a great way to establish your personal profile amongst prospective clients. To set yourself up for success, answer questions factually rather than in a salesy manner, and participate in a smaller number of groups frequently rather than spreading yourself too thin across a large number of groups.

Question & Answer Sites and Forums

While Q&A sites don't fit neatly into the traditional social media box, there's no doubt about their social nature, or their potential to drive customers to your business. Often the people asking the questions are prospective customers.

And because there's no expectation of a consistent stream of answers from any single user, they have many of the benefits of the more popular social media sites without the time commitment.

Great answers have the secondary benefit of ranking in search results months or even years after they were first posted.

Here are a few of the more popular question & answer sites:

  • Quora is primarily used by a community of entrepreneurs for advice about running their business, but questions run a wide gamut.
  • Yahoo! Answers is a similar service heavily used by the general public.
  • TripAdvisor offers users the ability to create their own city guides like this one—great for hoteliers and other companies in the hospitality industry.
  • Industry forums like Avvo (legal) and Intuit (accounting) can be a great way to pick up clients in the B2B sector.

Which Social Networks are Right for Your Business?

The ones where your existing customers already are, and prospective customers are likely to be. Be smart about the time and energy you invest in your social media presence, and make sure you recognize that it's not important to be on every social network. It may only be necessary to be on one or two to maximize your return. Take things one step at a time based on what you're comfortable with—and what you have time to take on.

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