HOTELMARKETING.COM

Get ahead of the location game

February 02, 2010 |

If you realize that more and more people are using smartphones, and that more and more people are searching for your business while mobile, you're going to have to shift some attention into how you show up in the location-aware world.

Get a Smart Phone: If at all possible, pick up an iPhone or a Motorola Droid or a Google Nexus 1 or a Palm Pre, or any of the other smart phones with a robust number of applications available. The applications you're looking to start exploring are Yelp, Layar, Foursquare, Twitter, and BrightKite to start. They each do something different. The point of this article isn't to talk about the apps. You can learn about those. My point is: get in the game. Without a sense of how others use these tools and see your business, you won't know how to prepare, and you won't have a tool to participate. It's part of business.

Start Creating Content: Start at Google Local and make sure you even show up there. If you do, consider writing a review. It's not clear whether these reviews go as far as a service like Yelp, but it doesn't hurt. Use FourSquare to create a location for your place. Check in via BrightKite. Tweet about the location. If you haven't built a Facebook Fan page for the business, decide whether that's a place you want to create and maintain. If so, make sure to include the physical address of the place, plus the name. If you have a blog or simple website, also make sure your street address is clear and obvious on the main page, as well. Part of getting local search to work is to anchor your web presence to your real-world presence.

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