Just because your business is local doesn’t mean your Facebook fans are.  At least, that’s what social marketing service Roost found when it evaluated over 800 SMBs using the Roost Local Scorecard.  The results: only 15% of the average local business’s Facebook fans are actually from the same city in which the business is located.  

This is obviously unwelcome news for those businesses that rely heavily—if not exclusively—on local traffic.  Think restaurants, bars, local service providers, etc.  If your business caters to the local community but the vast majority of your Facebook fans aren’t local, then you have some strategic marketing rethinking to do.

The results of the study aren’t terribly surprising.  Whenever I travel, I usually fall in love with a local spot and “like” it on Facebook to keep track of it…and to show my friends how worldly and cosmopolitan my interests are.  In fact, looking at the local businesses that I’ve liked on Facebook, only one of them is relatively “local” to me…and that’s Lost Coast Brewery, which is in Humboldt, CA.  Wow…I didn’t realize I was so pretentious.

“These initial findings are a real eye-opener in the world of SMB social marketing,” said Roost CEO Alex Chang.  “With small businesses’ livelihood at stake when it comes to attracting local customers, we designed the Scorecard not only to evaluate a business’ local presence, but also to provide recommendations on how to improve their social marketing efforts in their local market.”

The evaluation was done using the Roost Scorecard, which was unveiled in June. Offered as a free service on Roost’s website, the social Scorecard uses a proprietary algorithm to determine how well a business is penetrating its local market via social media. For example, business owners can see how local their customers are by using the Scorecard, which computes the geographic distribution of customer Likes, compares that to the current U.S. population data for that local market, and breaks the data down into a numerical score that businesses can use to gauge the effectiveness of their social media presence.

After struggling as a real estate search engine, Roost relaunched earlier this year as a social marketing platform just for local SMBs.  The service allows business owners to create an automated marketing campaign for social media without spending 10 hours a day on Facebook trying to keep up with posts and updates.  In June, a survey conducted by Roost found that most local businesses now prefer social marketing to search engine marketing.

Image source: affordable-internet-marketing.com