Roost Local Scorecard Helps Businesses See If Their Facebook Fans Live Nearby
August 1, 2011 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Roost, developer of a social publishing platform, today launched a new tool for local businesses on Facebook that helps them determine what percentage of their fans actually live close enough to be customers. Roost Local Scorecard breaks down where a Page’s fans list as their current city, and provides tips for gaining more local fans and engaging them.
By using Roost Local Scorecard, Page admins can determine how to revise their publishing and advertising strategies to maximize the positive impact of Facebook on their business.
San Francisco-based Roost develops free Facebook and Twitter publishing tools for professionals, small businesses, and consultants and agencies, as well as a premium tool for real estate agents. Businesses submit their zip code and industry, and Roost provides recommendations of relevant content to post from local and popular news news outlets.
The free Local Scorecard app, built on Facebook Connect, is designed to bring in new customers for Roost by alerting businesses to their publishing needs. Users grant the app extended permissions and it analyzes one or more of their Pages. The app then displays which cities and countries their fans are from, gives them a score for how local their fan base is, and provides recommendations for how to gain more local fans.
If businesses see that a high percentage of their fans are not local, they should consider changing how they market themselves. In terms of advertising, they should make sure they’re geotargeting non-fans that live nearby. They should also be sure to refine their targeting to local when advertising to existing fans to make sure they’re not promoting sales or events at their location that distant fans can’t take advantage of.
When publishing updates to Facebook, a Page with a low local fan percentage should concentrate on promotions that encourage existing local fans to invite their friends to Like the Page. This can include campaigns that drive towards a Like count milestone, such as “Help us get to 100,000 fans”, or coupons that fans will want to share with friends.
The local fan base percentage can indicate how a business should be using the untargeted publishing feature on Facebook. A low local percentage means Pages should publish links and other content to all their fans that can leverage distant customers, such as links to their web store.
While relatively simple and clearly intended to drive leads for its own business, Roost’s Local Scorecard can reveal important information to local business owners. It’s important to keep gaining more Likes, but these are only valuable if local businesses know where they’re coming from and how to engage them to drive a return on their social media investment.
