Twitter has introduced local trending which allows users to see trends within their chosen countries or cities. As a spokesman for Twitter explained, “Twitter trends began as a way to shed light on popular conversations.” The new local trending fulfils this remit by helping people to discover important and newsworthy local topics.
Twitter Trending – Big business for small businesses
Twitter is used by a lot of businesses to monitor online buzz and reputation, promote their services and attract customers. Many companies on Twitter, however, are small start-ups, taking advantage of a free service and trying to increase their margins. However, they end up lost in a sea of businesses doing the same. With local trending, a business can see what their trending region is tweeting about and how their local competitors are using the service.
With the increase in the number of companies who have taken advantage of online marketing and social media, partly due to the economic decline and partly due to big boom in social media, there has been an increase in companies outsourcing their online marketing services. This means that the businesses are jumping on the Twitter band wagon in droves. Local trending helps businesses and marketers to narrow their focus to only the applicable geographic region.
For a small, locally-based business that does not offer services on a national or worldwide scale, narrowing the focus to just a local area has massive benefits. Using local trending topics to identify potential customers has made the process faster and simpler, leaving businesses more time to engage with with their target markets.
Twitter is currently working on adding more cities and countries to its trending options; so more businesses will be able to establish their local customer base. For example, in the future, a digital marketing company like I-COM, who offers SEO in Manchester, will be able to track conversations relating to that will help to better promote SEO services and offer SEO advice to the Manchester community on Twitter.
Where next?
While at this stage local trending is very much finding its feet, it is increasingly a useful way to research and monitor trends in various cities, compare trends between cities, track opinions across countries and even worldwide. It also helps to relieve the time investment required by social media for small businesses trying to find a foothold in the market.
For companies that do operate nationally or internationally it may help with market research and understanding local and cultural attitudes when determining how to approach a specific market in a particular location. Having segmented information like this available on Twitter makes the service increasingly useful to businesses and may also open up a way of Twitter monetizing its service should it wish to sell market research data or tracking services in the future.
This is a guest post by Keir Gibson of I-COM SEO in Manchester, UK. You can also write guest articles and share your blogging tips.