Many of the small businesses are local in nature. Here’s an item from Mashable about study by Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://ow.ly/84QPK) that demonstrates overwhelmingly that consumers are not turning to Social Media for local business information. So1. What would a local business use Social Media for except to improve SERP ranking with social signals?2. How much effort and money should a local business spend on Social Media?3. Common sense says that people are more likely to buy what their friends recommend. With this and the above mentioned study results in mind, would one say that it is more or less mandatory for a local business to integrate widgets like ‘Facebook recommendations’ on their web site home page so that, even though the consumer may not be searching social media, they get clear signals about their friends’ recommendations?

@ashpadhye

Without reading the whole article, I find this interesting, but my own experience leads me to a different opinion.

I always choose local when it’s feasible; not sure how that skews my own experience, but:

• When I needed a chimney sweep I jumped on FB and asked…got about 27 responses and one overwhelming winner. Went with them.
• Saw all my “tweeps” checking in at Bayside Bowl, a new bowling alley in town. Because of that I went down there and discovered a hidden gem in my own town.
• Frequently choose meals based on their activity in social media. Admittedly, if the food sucks I won’t go back, but I like to see them in the conversation.

And personally, my company generates a lot of local business, and much of it is due to our activity in social media.

Thanks @rich-brooks and @eugenoprea

Pardon me but people who are active in Social Media networking clubs are hardly the general population, so the fact that we use Social Media to search for and research local services is neither here nor there. I mean I am sure Microsoft engineers overwhelmingly use Bing for search but the fact remains that Google is king of search.

Here’s my situation. My company has several customers who are auto dealerships. Almost all them are active (to different degrees) on Social Media. A few of them have a few thousand fans (which is not bad when your target area is in a radius of about 30 miles). But we are not seeing much traction except for some minor improvement in SERP ranking (which is valuable in itself)

My gut feel says that when someone is buying a car (which in most cases the 2nd most valuable purchase – after a house – in their lives), they would want to seek advice from their friends and would turn to social media.

But that does not seem to be happening. And the studies I quoted in my question seem to confirm that this phenomenon is not just our (or our customers’) failure but a common occurrence.

I suspect the main culprit is Google’s success in bringing up relevant pages based on the searcher’s location. And that is fine, because our customers usually rank in the first 4 listings for the keywords they are targeting.

My question really is what can we do (or advise our customers to do) so that they really see value for the efforts spent on Social Media? I do not think they are going to see a dramatic increase in number of leads they get simply because they post service coupons and special offers on facebook (which they do) because their target market finds the same coupons on their websites too.

So, how do we help them realize value from the efforts? To be clear, no one is complaining, but as a vendor, it is my job to see my customers get good returns on their efforts and money.

Any suggestions or examples?