Social media tracking allows businesses to identify which social media users are mentioning their brands. Social media tracking services, like the one media update has been experimenting with, can also reveal the regions that these social media users are in.

With the use of the social media tracking service, amaSocial, the media update team now knows which regions the social media users that engage with our content are located in. amaSocial monitors mentions of “media update” across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and centralises the location data of the posts it finds onto its platform.

At a glance we can, for instance, confirm that our social media audience is mostly located in Gauteng, with a smaller audience in Cape Town. It also shows us where our international social media audience is located.

This information helps us in two major ways: We can create more content that is relevant to audiences located in the regions we are receiving most engagement from. We can also identify the regions where we are getting low social media engagement, and create content that is more likely to appeal to those audiences.

What’s in it for brands?

“Location data is an essential tool for social media marketers seeking to improve their strategies,” Gavin Coetzee, digital monitoring researcher at amaSocial, tells media update. “But the power of location data stretches far beyond the social media team to the marketing department, and even to major decision-makers within the business.”

“Location data allows teams to focus their efforts in specific locations to achieve granular goals for each area ”

Based on our experience, here’s what we suggest brands use location data for ...

Five ways brands can use location data on social media:

1. Improve your campaigns

Location data can show you how consumers in different locations are responding to social media marketing campaigns. You can use this information to adapt your campaigns, from organic content to targeted advertising campaigns, in real time and reach audiences that are not responding to your campaign in specific regions.

Location data can also be useful in the planning stages of your campaigns. If you know that certain regions did not respond as well to previous campaigns as others did, you can consider tweaking the content for those regions.

Use location data to create content and adverts that are relevant to audiences in those areas, and use the targeting options on social networks to display these posts and adverts to users in those areas only.

2. Find influencers in regions you are targeting

A comprehensive social media tracking service like amaSocial shows businesses which people are engaging with their brands most often. media update is using this amaSocial feature, in combination with the platform’s Region filter, to see our most engaged social media users in specific provinces.

With information on the location of their most engaged users, brands can find influencers in the cities or towns they are targeting.

Influencers often have followers that are all located in one area. If you need to improve social media engagement in that region, invite the influencer to an influencer marketing programme to start communicating your marketing messages to their community of followers.

3. Segment your audience

Location data could indicate that social media users in one area prefer one product offering from your brand over another. If this is the case, you’ve just identified what each of those audiences are most interested in.

For example, social media users in Durban may prefer your cheese and chives chips, whereas social media users in Cape Town may prefer your salt and vinegar chips.This insight can help you create more detailed consumer personas as part of your marketing strategy.

4. Identify opportunities for improving services

Social media location data can show you the areas where people are either complimenting or complaining about your service.

Coetzee explains: “amaSocial allows you to filter your data by sentiment, or what we call favourability, so you can view posts with positive, negative, and neutral sentiment separately. Adding our Region filter to this information shows you which regions are receiving the most positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.”

Businesses can use this information to identify the regions where there are opportunities to improve their service, he notes.

5. Discover new target markets

The target market defined in your business plan might not match the location data of the audience engaging with you on social networks. If your social media fans are not based in the regions you are distributing your products to, you have two options:
  1. Change your social media marketing messages and targeted adverts to reach audiences in the regions you want; or
  2. Have the decision makers within the company use this information to inform their business strategy. It might be time to expand the company’s offerings into regions that are not currently being reached.
The geographic location of your brand’s fans and consumers no longer has to be a guessing game. Social media tracking services make it possible for marketers to know the ‘who’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ of social media users who mention your brand.

As Coetzee explains, “Location data is vital to understanding exactly where your consumers are, allowing you to develop specific campaigns for that region. Accurate location data can power your marketing initiatives, client service, and business growth.”

Interested in learning how social media monitoring tools can be used to develop better marketing strategies? Read more in our article, BLOG: Social media monitoring for better content and business strategies.