For the next in our series of case studies looking at how small businesses are using social media, we caught up with Marissa Green, Senior Marketing Associate at CitySquares Online
In no more than 50 words explain what your business is.
CitySquares Online, Inc. provides brick-and-mortar businesses across the country with Search Engine Optimized profiles that have hyper-local context. These profiles attract members in the business’ community because they contain information that is useful to their neighborhood and has the right content to drive the customers to local business’ doors. We provide all this easily and affordably to small businesses with deep analytics so it’s effortless for them to identify the ROI of having a CitySquares profile.
How do you use social media as a business?
We have picked up our social media efforts greatly in the past 6 months. Our strongest areas are with our twitter accounts and our blog. We have over 1,000 followers on our main twitter account @citysquares. Here we help promote our customer’s latest promotions, connect with communities across the country and work to unlock the barrier between a national website and individual neighborhoods across the country. We have also extended our outreach efforts by creating both @citysquarestx and @citysquaresny accounts to make our communication strategy even more hyperlocal and expand into two spaces that are hot markets in the local industry. We regularly blog to give small business owners the tips and tricks to make the most out of their profiles and provide the right insight to be successful brick-and-mortar businesses.
What are your business/marketing objectives for social media?
Social media is ideal for the whole idea behind CitySquares. We are looking to reach out to each passerby that peeks into a local businesses window. We want to find that neighbor who tweets about everything local whenever they have a chance. We are looking to find out the littlest details in communities. We can find this information and uncover the secrets and hidden treasures of neighborhoods all across the country by using social networking and media sites.
Do you measure the success of your social media marketing? If so, how?
We measure our success but we don’t put pressure on immediate results. We analyze our social media efforts by how many twitter fans we have, how many people are interacting on our Facebook wall and the reactions we get on our blog posts. But, ost importantly, because of how hyper-local we want our reach to be, we have patience. We would rather have 500 twitter followers that actually read what we say and care about the local cause, then have 4,000 who glance right over our posts.
How does social media fit in with the other marketing your company does?
We incorporate social media a great deal in most of our marketing plans. When we get mentioned in the news or in a blog post, we share our recognition online. When we run promotions and contests we notify our followers, fans and readers and incorporate them in every part of the promotion. We crowdsource many of our marketing efforts by asking our public audience what they want to see and what they want to read on our blog.
Do you have plans to increase your use of social media in 2010?
We have some very exciting changes coming up in 2010 and we know social media will be a big asset in helping to further advance us into the local space. We would like to make our Facebook fan page a better forum for small business owners across the nation to share tips with one another and open up dialogue between them. We also have plans to expand our NY and TX twitter accounts and reach out to local consumers in those areas.
What would be your top 3 tips for businesses looking to get involved in social media?
- Don’t try to keep up with the Jones- Look at examples of social media successes with other small businesses but do not base your entire digital plan on what they are doing. As with any business, big or small, no business plan fits all. You need to use social media to achieve your own goals and objective, not what the store down the street’s objectives goals.
- You may be small, but think big- Don’t let the size of your business stop you from thinking big with your social media outreach. Naked Pizza, a small company in New Orleans, generated a huge part of their sales due to twitter efforts. It’s possible, more possible then just putting a sign outside your door with your daily specials. Instead of one person seeing your latest promotion, the five people that re-post your promotion will reach out to 40 people. Social media expands your audience and eventually your customer base.
- Have fun with your social media explorations. If your posts don’t show the personality behind your business, your customers won’t believe in what you are writing. They won’t see what you are doing as genuine, but more as a way to drive more sales. Customers see right through you, make them a community, not just another way to make your cash register ring.
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