Social media can be highly effective for local businesses who are interested in generating more clients and sales.
Location based social media has become very important.
However, the individual users feel about "checking in" to a business and the privacy issues is less of concern for businesses and the social platforms.
The truth is that these features are coming very important for local businesses.
These features allow a business to gain advertising on people's time lines and feeds for almost no cost.
A business gains advertising on the time lines and fees of their users.
This provides social proof and a "living" testimonial of the places that friends and family should visit.
If a person visits this establishment often and "checks in" then this business has developed credibility with the community of that user.
This is free advertising that a business should make a plan to establish with its user base.
Businesses that are local have less competition than those who compete nationally.
This is especially true when a business looks at the competition within the social networks for certain keywords.
Most businesses do not have knowledge that they should optimize their content for SEO (or search engine optimization).
However, this is a massive marketing gap that any business should strive to use.
Any content that is used on the major social media platforms should be optimized for search engine traffic.
Most of the major social media networks are developed so that the content is found on the search engines.
It is the job of the business owner or the director of marketing to make sure that all the content that they post on the major social platforms is optimized.
Social media also gives a business another asset to optimize and potentially knock competitors of the first page by using the social media profile appropriately and with the right optimization techniques.
This ability is very important in a competitive market place, if the social media profile does not take up room on the first page, then it can rank elsewhere for the keyword and knock other competitors off those spots.
A business that has multiple assets in the search engine stands a better chance of winning the search engine war than a business that only has a web site.
It is smart for a business to obtain as many assets as they can and optimize those assets to show up on the search engines.
This is especially useful for local businesses because they compete with fewer businesses on the local level.
Therefore, any asset that consumes a spot on the search engines makes it exponentially harder for their competitor to gain any traction in the online mediums.
Social signals are also playing a bigger part in search engine optimization.
This is because social signals are harder for businesses to control and to acquire.
This means that in the coming years the search engines will be paying closer attention to what businesses are talked about and how they are talked about in the social media circles.
It is smart to generate as much content and buzz as possible before this new metric takes hold in the search engine realm.
As with any other discipline, the early adopters will know more and gain more advantageous than those who do not adopt the technology at this present time.
Local businesses who adopt an aggressive approach to this method may be able to gain ground on their larger competitors who are slower to adopt.
Local businesses should take advantage of the social networking platforms and make sure that they are optimized to show up well in the search engines.
This extra step will help a business gain more exposure and clients than not optimizing their content for search.
As always, it only takes a few more steps to do more than a competitor does and this can add up to be a great difference over time.
An effective social networking plan could be all that separates a local business from scraping by or dominating a niche.