By Andrés Uribe, Expedition PR
It’s Social Media Week in NYC and our local team had the pleasure of attending the “Hyperlocal Goes Social” event this Tuesday hosted by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. Panelists discussed best practices for using social media with a hyperlocal marketing strategy. Here are two especially effective strategies that were presented:y Andrés Uribe, Expedition PR
1. Unique, local hashtags: The founder of Brooklyn Swirl, Jean Alerte, demonstrated the power of using a unique and local hashtag when promoting his frozen yogurt shop located in Bed-stuy. On opening day Jean was able to attract 500 customers and keep up a steady stream of new customers throughout the summer with his #BrooklynSwirl campaign. He did this by making sure that everyone who entered the store knew that if they were going to talk about Brooklyn swirl, they should use the hashtag #BrooklynSwirl.
This strategy is as simple as it is powerful. A unique local hashtag has the ability to create a ripple effect throughout a community that will bring a great deal of attention to your local business. Through the use of the unique hashtag, local consumers are able to easily see when one of their friends is talking about your business. This creates valuable brand impressions that will help your business get noticed and drive traffic.
2. Consumer’s voice: Playing off the age-old philosophy of ‘the customer is always right’, Karen Tapin from Karen’s Body Beautiful was able to dramatically boost her sales to retailers across the country. After closing her store in order to beef up manufacturing of her beauty products and sell them to retailers nationwide, her loyal customers were upset that the stores would not be carrying her full line of products. Karen felt the same way, and asked all of her customers to tweet Target and let them know what products they wanted to see at their local store. Shortly after she told her customers to do this, Karen received a call from Target to increase their order size as well as the amount of products they would carry.
This is an excellent example of how to leverage an existing customer base in order to drive B2B sales and move your product into new outlets. Many companies are very active on social media, making it a great way to reach out to them. You can cold call all day to try to have your product placed in big retail chains, but if you can gather enough customers on social media asking for your product from a retailer, then all you’ll need to do is answer your phone.
If you have any hyperlocal social media best practices of your own, please share them with us on Twitter @ExpeditionPR.