Bonus way to get more locals to follow you online

Tourism groups and small businesses both struggle with a common question: once we get online, how do we get local people to follow, like or friend us?

Working on regional economic development at Northwest Oklahoma Alliance.

OK, now that you’re in the room with your
locals, how do you get them to follow, like
and friend you?

Last week, I shared three ways to get locals to follow you online. I deleted two comments off that post (because they came in a flood of spam) that suggested the fourth, bonus method to get more locals to follow you:

Hold local events. This gives you a chance to talk about your online efforts in an offline setting. You can create events of your own, or participate in other local events and activities.

The challenge is that most of us already attend and take part in local events. We just don’t know how to convert our participation in local events into more local followers.

What if you brought along a conversation piece? You could make photo books from your Flickr or Facebook photos, booklets from blog posts, or video dvds from your YouTube videos. When you hand those out, you have the perfect excuse to talk about your social networking and what your followers gain by participating.

(Disclosure: I took this idea from Jon Swanson, in a post we wrote here in 2008: Promoting your media to the offline world.)

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.