Economic Development and Social Media

Posted by Retail Attractions Blog on November 25, 2015 in Blog | No Comments

Social media can be a powerful tool when you’re focusing on promoting economic development in your community. A quality social media presence attracts attention from people within the community and potential outside investors.

On the other hand, poorly managed social media can sabotage lucrative retail recruitment deals. If you’re going to use social media in your economic development efforts, make sure it’s a properly managed campaign. Using Retail Attractions streamlines your economic development efforts, and ensures your social media campaign is a help rather than a hindrance.

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Accurate

Making sure the information you share is accurate plays a critical role in encouraging economic development. If your community’s social media isn’t managed well and frequently circulates half-truths and rumors, it makes it hard for investors to trust your community.

Restricting who’s able to post is one of the best ways to ensure accurate information is shared. The city leaders who are best informed on matters of economic development should be in charge of what gets posted in the marketing campaigns. Retail Attractions can advise on training a social media team about what to post, and how to manage mistruths that others in the community might circulate by accident.

Interesting

Accuracy isn’t the only thing that counts on social media. Your community’s posts also have to catch readers’ eyes if you want them to trend well. One of the best ways to do this is incorporating video and pictures. An image will catch someone’s eye when they’re scrolling through social media a lot easier than a post that’s just text. People are also more likely to share a post that contains images or video.

You can drive more traffic to your posts by using hashtags. This is especially important on Twitter, but they’re also supported by other social media platforms like Facebook. Hashtags let you reach people who are monitoring specific keywords. When someone clicks on the hashtags #econdev (Economic Development) or #CRE (Corporate/Commercial Real Estate), you want them to find posts from your community.

Relevant

Once you’re reaching your target audience, make sure you’re posting things that will encourage them to engage with your community. Show that you’re supporting local entrepreneurs. Share pictures of sites and properties that are available for economic development. Announce positive news in your community. Post interesting demographic information, including data provided by Retail Attractions.

While you’re posting all this information, try to tell a story. Narrative catches your audience’s attention more surely than dry facts. People like to hear success stories, watch video interviews with local entrepreneurs, and read the story of why a company chose to build in your community. On platforms like Twitter where the amount you can write is limited, use social media to share blog posts and videos.

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