Is Your Business Ready for Location-Based Social Media Marketing?

by Willy Lim
(Co-Founder, NetProfitQuest)

Original article appears in October 2010 issue of SME & Entrepreneurship Magazine

It seems like every new phone out there is a smartphone with built-in GPS. These are technology marvels of our times: gigahertz of computing power with gigabytes of storage space, coupled with an integrated GPS-chip and 3G internet connection, all these squeezed into a device that fits in your palm. 20 years ago, this would have sounded like a device that Captain Kirk from Star Trek would use to beam him up to Starship Enterprise.

Ok, the smartphone doesn't quite teleport you like the transporter from one place to another...yet. But with Google Maps installed, it does help you to navigate from point A to point B. To a casual consumer, that is convenience on the go because it means being able to find places without having to lug a thick and heavy hardcopy of street directory around.

But these GPS-enabled smartphones with internet connectivity have much deeper implications for the local businesses.

From a 10,000 feet perspective, GPS-enabled plus internet connectivity means "information accessibility, anytime, anywhere". This is THE ongoing revolution: the internet is becoming increasingly localized. This is great news for SMEs, because most SMEs are localized in nature.
For example, a cafe in Petaling Jaya doesn't need to be promoted globally but the owner would definitely be interested to promote his cafe to the people who are in the Petaling Jaya vicinity.

Now, it used to be that major search engines like Google, performs searches that are global in nature. But it really isn't of much use to us as end consumers, that when we search "cafe", all the cafes from US, UK and Australia turn up, when what we are really interested in, is a cafe that is in our locality, and in this case, Petaling Jaya.

But all that has changed, as Google now can provide localized search results based on your location. And how does Google know your location? Yes, through that GPS-enabled smartphone you are using to search for nearby businesses.

By pin-pointing your location with the GPS chip in your phone, Google will show you the locations of all the cafes that are nearby to you. In the picture shown, the blue spot is my current location and the red spots are all the cafes that are nearby to me. Noticed how I searched for "cafe" but Google shows me only localized results that are near to me.

The implications of this location-based search results are huge for local businesses. It means that a local business can have increased human traffic coming to the business outlet just by having an increased visibility on Google local searches.

Some interesting statistics that you may want to take note:-

1. Adults now spend more than 15 hours per week on the internet

2. Broadband access will grow from 55% to 90% by 2012

3. 35% of the global workforce will be mobile by 2013

4. Mobile location-based services market to exceed USD 12 billion by 2014

5. Global smartphones market to reach 804.42 million units by 2015

All these statistics point to the inevitable: that more and more people, in the next 5 years, are going to use their mobile phones to go onto the internet to search for information about products and services that they need. The question would then be: Will your potential customers find you, or your competitor's offering using their mobile phones?