Leveraging The Benefits of Location-Based Social Media

Businesses are often left wondering what to do with all the data they accumulate from social media. One solution is location-based social media monitoring, which involves the segmentation of data from social networks (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) by geographical location to identify patterns.

Marketing departments can use location-enabled media and measurement services to transform social media location data into actionable business insights and optimise marketing campaigns by filtering, organising and measuring conversations by location. There are a number of methods and benefits to this approach:

New Keywords And Phrases

Keywords and phrases that might otherwise be lost in the sea of social media are easily identified using location-based media monitoring. A recent article on social media listening, lists an interesting crisis management use case from data gathered by social networks from dozens of Olympic locations. The research revealed that people talking about the Olympics on social media platforms were not using the expected keywords – in fact, almost 70% of online conversations did not contain any target keywords for the event.

By analysing the keywords used in conversations around the Olympic site, companies found new leads and information they were not previously tracking. This could be done by other businesses through monitoring specific regions or adding city names to keyword queries, which is a method known as geo-tagging. This approach might be particularly useful for businesses that have several different store locations, for example.

Market And Product Demand

Filtering social media conversations by location, pinpoints where a company and its competitors, are most active. For example, a competitor receiving a lot of buzz from a location where a business’s store is located may provide useful insights into demand for a specific product or service. This would allow for better brand monitoring to boost marketing efforts at that specific store.
Filtering by location could also allow a company to find conversations about its products or services in a location where it does not have a store, and consider the option of expanding into that area.

Cultural Trends

Businesses can better understand the ‘language’ of their customers by segmenting social media data by country or region. For example, the term ‘football’ has a different meaning in the USA than in the UK. By understanding cultural differences, marketing teams can learn which trends and products are most popular in certain locations and optimise campaigns for their location-based popularity accordingly.

Sharing Customer Posts

Location-based data allows businesses to find appropriate content to share, and this results in more effective brand promotion. For example, sharing content of customers enjoying a product at a particular location will increase a brand’s popularity and the message’s sentiment.