Social Media Strategy – Going Local

Every day I get at least 10 notifications from Pinterest, alerting me that some distant acquaintance from back home (the US) has inadvertently “followed all of my boards” on Pinterest.

The addictive image-cum-idea sharing site has indeed infested my homeland. According to a recent article from TechWatch, Pinterest has saturated the Midwest, and has yet to spread itself quite as thickly anywhere else. Why is this? What is it about the site that ardently appeals to the young ladies of the wide open plains? No one has figured it out yet, as far as I’ve read… but that’s not what I find intriguing. The concentration of Pinterest users in the Midwest is a testament to the idea that social media traction is largely dependent on location. Different regions stick to different kinds of social media.

Take Foursquare. According to the 2011 Ignite Social Media report, the location-based social media app stuck with Indonesians, Singaporeans and Malaysians like white on rice. In the UK, however, it was barely a tenth as popular. “But that’s just East versus West”, you might argue. Surprisingly, however, Foursquare’s popularity in Japan was closer to the UK than it was to Singapore.

Of course, there are exceptions. Facebook and YouTube have traction everywhere, great (ahem) firewalls permitting…

In addition to location and culture, trust is a major factor set to significantly shape future social media trends.
Another recent (and fascinating) article from TechCrunch gave some insight into where personal technologies have room to grow, and pointed out that even the most useful Siri can’t tell you the best place to take your clothes when the washer breaks. That’s because even though Siri is ‘everywhere’, Siri is not here.

An increasing number of media minds are subscribing to this notion of hyper-localisation – that ultimately, infinite knowledge can never win over local knowledge. This is because the intrinsic value of knowledge is trust, and trust is strongest when it’s right outside your front door. The knowledge itself doesn’t need to come from your aunt or your college roommate, but more than likely it’ll need to be endorsed by them. Jon Batelle summed it up nicely in his post on the future of search engines: “the future of search isn’t search; it’s a conversation with someone we trust”.

Globalisation is all well and good, but at the end of the day, the network theory makes the most sense. Globalisation has not produced a flatter world – it’s produced a complex set of networks built on varying degrees of trust in relationships. We can access any network we want, but we don’t afford all of them the same level of affinity.

So where does social media marketing come into this? Like everything else, these local networks with their local features and local characteristics are open. They’re accessible. They just require a little adaption. Alexandra Tursi from KSV wrote about how these “narrowed communication channels” provide a more intimate, direct and personal approach to marketing. Tursi also linked to a fabulous report from SocialBakers whose research illustrated how local Facebook pages commanded more engagement than global ones.

Localised social media strategy requires a little more legwork – a fusion of marketing, media theory and social anthropology.
For example:

• Who are the people you’re (really) trying to target?
• Where do they live?
• What do they see when they wake up in the mornings?
• What do they eat for breakfast?
• And most importantly, what makes it different than breakfast bowls elsewhere… and why?

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