While many companies are now using Facebook and Twitter as part of their marketing strategies, few of them are incorporating location-based applications into their marketing plans. According to eMarketer, 33 million people used a location-based application in 2010 and the number of mobile social network users is predicted to double 2010 – 2015.
It’s free and easy to put your business on this “map”, enabling you to get marketing exposure from people who voluntarily track and post their locations online. So why hasn’t every business verified their location on Foursquare or other location-based social media applications?
The fact is that many businesses and marketers are confused about where to begin and how. With so many different location-based applications and social media sites, businesses are often scared that they would be opening themselves up to unwanted comments or to setting up (yet another) platform they can’t commit to monitoring. In this regard, business owners need to know:
The way smartphone users actively engage with locations is changing the way companies are able to market themselves. The development of GPS technologies, the continuously increasing popularity of smartphones, mobile commerce and rising use of location-based social network services (such as Foursquare) means that the one-way conversation of location sharing has now changed to a two-way, mutually beneficial conversation between smartphone users and businesses.
There is only one key thought process you need to act on to reach more customers and start building a deeper relationship with your existing customers and that is simply location, location, location.
Setting up your Social-Location-Mobile (So-Lo-Mo) strategy and integrating it with your existing marketing initiatives will enable you to ask the right questions, measure the right items, understand your customers’ online behavior patterns and optimize your marketing strategies.
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