A Citibank survey revealed an interesting fact, local businesses do not profit from social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and over time stop their engagement of those channels, as they are not turning in the results they expected.
Not a big surprise, local businesses are run by people who have a lot on their hands, they (sometimes) need to manage and work at the same time, they need to make the most of their time, and learning how to interact with (leads) strangers over the internet might not be something they have the time or the energy to do. Even once the business owners or their employees go through the effort of learning the ropes and engaging a social media channel they have to maintain an effort and keep on posting, answering and asking question and coming up with new information for their channel, which is difficult to do while running a business.
As Maria Veltre, Executive Vice President of Citi’s Small Business Segment says – “While social media can provide additional channels to network and help grow a business, many small businesses may not have the manpower or the time required take advantage of them.” And that is the whole thing in a nugget.
Local businesses online should do what they do best, and that is not communicating on the internet, if they have the manpower and resources to start engaging a new line of communication they should try that effort for a good few weeks, or hire an expert to do this job for them, report back to them and establish reachable goals and milestones for decisions.
This is the task of local SEO experts, Search engine optimization for local businesses could perform all of this socail media work and maintain a steady and solid channel that would answer the needs of the communities as well as the public profile of the local businesses, in certain cases a specific person working for the local business can follow the SEO expert work and in a few months take over the task, leaving the local SEO expert with only the task of reporting and development tasks.
