While it’s well known that Twitter is a great marketing tool for online businesses, not many marketers realize its importance as a medium to bring strong relationship with local media. Twitter is a blessing for small businesses and is heavily armed with a set of powerful tools for local marketing.
How can Twitter help you build relationships with local media? Let’s find out.
Find your neighbors
It is easy to find users and businesses in your neighborhood using the Advanced Search feature on Twitter. You can enter the postal code of the desired region and specify the distance for target region in miles/ kilometers. From the list of tweets, search the people whom you want to follow and send them a Follower request. IMO, it is advisable to search for local media and get associated with them on Twitter. This can help spread the word about your business in the local community.
There are a number of third-party tools which can effectively locate Twitter users in your vicinity. I personally like ChirpCity and NearbyTweets for finding Twitters users in my local community.
Create a Community
Once you’ve found the target customers in your geographical proximity, the next step is to engage them actively with your business. I recommend creating a community of such local users. A community offers a win-win situation for all parties – your customers get a platform to interact amongst themselves and with your business and you benefit from the reduced risk of people losing interest in your business and un-following you.
Getting connected to Twitter users in your local area is of no use if can not sustain these relationships. Communities are a great way of ensuring that your relationships do not die down as time passes. Do not forget that your competitors are also trying hard to steal the limelight in local media. Getting local media engaged with your business can be beneficial to you and provides a competitive advantage.
Twitter Trends
IMO, the Local Trends feature in Twitter is one of the most effective ways for a business to monitor its online reputation. It’s a free service and mighty effective in determining how well or how badly your business is doing on Twitter, what is the local community tweeting about your business and what is their opinion about your local competitors.
Many small businesses build products for the local community. However, they find it difficult to narrow down their target customer base to areas in geographical vicinity for their location. Twitter allows such businesses to focus on local areas and identify potential customers in the local community.
Local Events, Product Launches
Spread the word about local events and new product launches on Twitter. Encourage your followers to retweet these messages so that it reaches out the maximum number of people. This is a great way to build a buzz about your product in the local community.
Further, make sure that you participate actively in the relevant local events (business Meetups, conferences, road shows) and spread the word about it on Twitter. This helps establish your brand’s reputation in the local media.
Twitter has now reached a landmark figure of 15 billion tweets and sees nearly 2 billion tweets every month. This should give you an idea of Twitter’s amazing popularity and the massive potential for promoting your business in the local media. If you are not using Twitter to build relationships with local media, you are missing out on a big opportunity!
New media is awesome…it leveled the playing field for the little guy, but…
Old media still rules and a great way to reach many people is to use local TV/radio. Not only to expand your non-internet following, but to expand your internet following as well….
We do get so single-minded in our interweb pursuits we sometimes forget how powerful traditional media can be…great reminder, great post…thank you.
Tried NearbyTweets – love it, thanks for the idea and great post.
Excellent information, thanks for the tips. I am new to Twitter an old work horse from the old Internet days getting restarted again and all this is completely different so the helpful insight and the direction pointing is extremely nice!
Thanks and welcome back Brad.
I love the idea of creating a community via Tweets.. It brings back the feeling of porches, lazy afternoons, neighbors who are friendly and small talk…
We may be living separate lives, but tweeting fills some of the social need we all have as humans..
Twittering provides connection. Following or reading tweets are also a way to look into the life of someone else.. or as much as they will reveal.
Follow me and I will follow @ericstraatsma
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