The use of social media has become one of the most effective ways for businesses to increase their customer's base, using online marketing strategy . By doing this, they involve a large number of online users in their business, thereby getting more customers and creating a friendly relationship with their current customers. With the aid of specific strategy targeted at increasing a business ranking in the online world, 'Geo-tag' came about as part of a successful marketing strategy for businesses.
Geo-tagging, which is a technique under location-based marketing, involves the inclusion of adding geographical information to websites, videos, images and many other sources. This additional geographic information is most times in forms of coordinates (latitude and longitude). Names of places like the address to a particular street, town, codes (both postal zip and telephone area) are also added. Online users are also provided with some exciting features that come with geotagging; an example is pictures that are always added to names of streets. When a user inputs the name of a road into Google search engine, the user will have access to images that have been captured in that location with links to the satellite or maps of that particular area. Geo-tagging has also been implemented into the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. this allows users to know the location of their friends, contacts and followers.
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Geo-tagging as a technique helps to identify a location, either by providing an image or to show where a particular picture is taken and posted in a specific time. It utilises the GPS of a smartphone to detect the location that a person is in one particular point in time. Majority of the social media platforms uses this geo-tagging feature, as it allows people to know where friends or colleagues are. For example, if you run a coffee shop and people can see the name, location and other additional information about your business. This geo-tagging feature works as a form of advertisement, especially when customers tag the location of your business. By doing this, the customer's followers can then have access to where your business is, with pictures of the place attached to the post.
The most popular way of implementing geo-tagging as a method of location-based marketing is in the use of organising contests online especially on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, sales, coupons and during the promotion of an event for a particular product. Performing analysis on geo-tags is also a part of SEO strategy. By doing this, you are also keeping tabs on the image metadata, which is part of the digital marketing strategy you perform for your business. Each of the major social media platforms has ways by which locations can be tagged to images. For Facebook, there is a location pin which is labelled 'Check In', clicking in this allows you to add the location of the particular place before creating a post. Twitter also has the same location pin which, when clicked on, will provide a list of close-by sites. And for Instagram, the caption tab makes it possible for you to add the location before a post (images or videos) is made.
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Geo-tagging as a technique is very useful for increasing the visibility of your business or company on social media or search engines. The use of mobile devices to connect to the internet is growing daily, and it is essential for business owners to make use of this opportunity in optimising their websites to fit into other smaller mobile electronic devices. Business is now making this secure transmission from the conventional method of marketing to the digital marketing method, whereby they utilise every available technique to improve their online business activity. With the help of geo-tagging, it moves your business higher from merely having a website to establishing you online and making your business visible when searched for on the search engine page.
Some of the significant benefits that are attached to the use of geo-tagging include; increase in rates of returns in terms of profit. It allows users to find your business online, allowing them to engage in more business transaction. Other benefits are:
For small business owners, they can enjoy the benefit of geotagging by attaching their business to their online contents (blogs, images and videos). By doing so, you can reach your target audience faster by directing them to your webpage where they get to know more about your business.
Also, geo-tagging is very important to help increase ranking on SERP (Search Engine Result Page). For small businesses that are looking to grow, results from search engine pages are beneficial to help them gather more customers.
The technique of geotagging is not new; it has been in use by most of the website developers. Its importance in use for business is now growing, moving it from little use to necessity. With the increase in customers that are searching daily on their mobile devices, the search engine is now using their locations as factors in the search engine results.