Social Media, Meet Online Listings

Luckily, we're only dealing with simple math: 1 + 1 = 2. Social media has been a game changer over the past six or seven years, not just digitally, but for the marketing industry as a whole. In a similar vein, local local listings sites such as Yelp and Foursquare changed the way we look up business information and find local stores.

Considering how important these two channels are for small business owners, it seems odd that so many management platforms fail to integrate the two. Most of the time it’s either all social or all local listings, but never both. Put 'em together, and what have you got? Well, it's not a pumpkin that turns into a carriage, but something more important for your business.

One of the reasons we built Brandify was to give small business owners a complete overview of every single one of their online accounts. That means an overview of your social accounts as well as your online listings, something no other platform offers. Social media is quickly becoming the backdrop for everything we do online, from signing into an ecommerce site or simply watching YouTube videos. The more we take it for granted, the more important it becomes to integrate it with everything your business does online.

If you haven’t linked your business' social accounts to your Yelp or Google Places listings, then you’re not giving you customers a chance to move to and from your social profiles to your listings pages. These are the dots that need to be connected for your customers to make it as easy for them as possible to go from social to listings to website and into your store.

At Brandify, we give you the tools and provide direction for building the doorways between your online profiles. Creating those openings lets your customers move seamlessly between the listings they find online to your website where they can find even more information about your store.

Consider this: 3 out of 4 mobile searches trigger follow up actions, which includes visiting a store, making a purchase, or sharing information about that store with someone else. If you’re not connecting the dots between your company's online profiles, how are your customers supposed to do the same?