Social media pages for store locations have 5x the engagement of brand pages [Report]

Until comparatively recently, most multilocation brands and enterprises didn’t maintain separate corporate and individual store location pages on social media. There was a single national brand account, and social posts were typically generated from that account. All that has started to change, however, with more enterprises creating local pages.

It’s making a significant difference in engagement. Presence and social media management platform MomentFeed did an analysis of aggregated customer data from “more than 50 clients from October 2016 through April 2017.” In each case, the brand had a national account on one or more of the major social platforms (i.e., Facebook, Instragram, Twitter); it also had individual store or restaurant location pages.

Focus of consumer social media engagement

Source: MomentFeed customer data (2017)

MomentFeed reported that “an astonishing 84.8 percent of all consumer impressions happen on assets that represent individual stores, showrooms and restaurants. Just 15.2 percent of impressions happen on brand or corporate assets — including the brand’s own website.”

Consumers showed a dramatic preference for locally relevant pages vs. national or “corporate” pages on social media sites. Most of this engagement is also happening via smartphones, and most traffic and impressions were coming from just five sources: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing.

On Facebook in particular, the data showed that there were “25x more impressions taking place on location-based Facebook pages than on corporate (brand) Facebook pages.” Among the reasons for this, consumers perceive local content to be more relevant than generic brand content. There’s often specific information on these pages (e.g., offers, hours), which may be helpful in making purchase decisions. It’s also the case that local Facebook local Pages carry reviews, which consumers want.

Source: MomentFeed customer data (2017)

There are other, more detailed insights in the MomentFeed report. Among them is the fact that the ratio of national vs. local page impressions can vary by total number of business locations. Curiously, the highest local vs. national ratios were for enterprises with fewer than 100 and more than 1,000 locations. The report offers conjecture about why this might be.

There’s more interesting data in the full report, including a breakdown of traffic sources and a comparison of Google and Yelp in terms of traffic vs. conversions. The document can be accessed here (after registration).

[Article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.