Social Campaign spending varies by company size and budget but the notion that the most innovative stuff is driven by large corporations with the pocket book to fund impressive content and linkage between the physical world and the digital world is dead wrong. You might see billboards with hashtags for Coca Cola or vibrant twitter activity during political or sporting events but you don’t have to be a large corporation to leverage social media to drive traffic to your business. Local-Social or sometimes called Micro-Social are concepts describing the innovative approaches of small businesses to drive engagement and traffic to their mom and pop businesses through social media. See, this is the power of the internet and of social media. Social participation is a classless opportunity, even for businesses. Anyone with an internet connection and a computer can harness it. That is just what one of my favorite local bars has been doing since 2010. The bar is called the Beverage Place Pub and it operates in sunny West Seattle.
The Beverage Place Pub is a beer bar in West Seattle with over 100 different beers available. The taps rotate constantly and the atmosphere is friendly. The Beverage Place leverages two social channels to raise awareness and drive traffic. Its twitter account boasts over 1700 followers and its Facebook account has over 3000 likes. The content that the business is publishing can be broken up into three areas. First there are events. This bar has a ton of events on its event calendar and makes it hard to keep track of them. Joining their Twitter and Facebook makes it easy to keep up. Second they announce their frequent keg rotation. You can see what is being tapped and when. This is a good enticement to come down and enjoy your favorite beveridge. Third, they announce hours so you can see when they open early for a Seahawks game or close early on a holiday. Even though they have a relatively limited amount of followers those followers are in the neighborhood and may be enticed to stop down impulsively when a tweet goes out announcing a new beer is being tapped or a special is on. The real opportunity for Local Social participants is local flash promotions.
Even though the tweets and posts are relevant they could do more. I noticed they did offer a free beer to the 3000 person to like them I think they could offer more linkages between the digital and physical world. Perhaps something aimed at really enticing the locals to get off their couch and come down for a pint. They could offer a free pint for the entire 6000 block of 42nd avenue. They could offer a free pint to anyone north of Alaska avenue. All of these offers could then be time-boxed for say an hour to entice those to come down immediately. Once there the bar has the opportunity to sell them a 2nd and a 3rd beer. This would also drive more followers because once the word got out about innovative geo based specials the locals would be checking their twitter account to see if there were specials that they could take advantage of.
The bottom line is that social media can drive engagement and traffic to the smallest business on a local level. And there are creative ways to engage with the neighborhood that can be leveraged to drive dollars to the bottom line.
UW TMMBA - ENTRE 528 