One of the difficulties that many businesses face when confronted with social media marketing is locating and connecting with people only in their local service area. This local service area could be as big as Scotland or the UK. It could also be as small as Dundonald or Ayrshire.

Facebook has been one social media site that has made connecting with locals reasonably easy. There are also local social networking sites that one can engage in. Twitter, one of the fastest growing social media sites, is making local connections a little easier.

You can of course do a search on Twitter based on regional names. There are, however, millions of users that don’t include that data in their profiles. Twitter’s new local trends, whilst not broadly available as yet, could make life a lot easier. At present, local trends is only available for a few large cities like London and the UK. They will be extending it over time – how local is yet to be seen, however, it still may make life easier for local businesses.

If you’re located here in Scotland then at some stage Scotland data, and perhaps even data from smaller regions, will be available. I can see three immediate benefits from this data. First, you can see which users are setting and following these trends, and add them to your lists. They either reside in, or have in an interest in, that particular region.

Secondly, if you plan a marketing program and it appears in the trends, you will know you have hit the right formula. Finally, by knowing what is trending in your region, you can modify your own approach to take advantage of those trends – ride on the back of them. Social media marketing is here to stay and is growing in importance every day. If you’re a local business servicing a local area, it makes sense to connect with as many people from your area as possible. They are all potential customers so bring them into your sphere of influence and as quickly as possible.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 5:08 am and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.