Talking with many local and regional businesses about social media, so many say that their social media is all taken care of using Reach Local. While I like so much of what Reach Local has to offer, they are not a social media company. They offer several great products like putting out relevant content on the web to help search engines organically bring you to the top of Google, and that is important.
They do offer social media marketing, but it’s an afterthought and since ‘social media’ is all the rage, they’d be silly not to offer it. For many, social media is overwhelming, complicated, time-consuming and confusing. If they feel like they have it covered on some level, they’re okay with it. Well, my friends, that is a huge mistake. Pay attention or pay the price down the road.
Like it or not, social media is it’s own entity and not an afterthought. Like I’ve said so many times before and I’ll say it again, social media is a two-way conversation that gets people talking about your business. Real Local does not do that. I’m not trying to bad mouth them here because, again, they have a lot of good things to offer and it’s worth a look, however, social media experts they are not. I’m here to help educate you the best I can.
Reach Local offers you so much for one low price. Sounds amazing right? Too good to be true? Yes. It is.
Every single person I’ve talked to using Reach Local for their Facebook page has absolutely no engagement, people talking about it and an average of about 50 likes, maybe; coupled with the fact that they’re putting out the same content across everything and promoting sales and one-way messaging. When you do that, people begin to hide your feed and you’re not left talking to anyone at all. So that low package price they offer you including the social media is actually hurting you.
Leave social media to the people who know it best and if Reach Local is a good fit for your company in their areas of strength, I urge you to use them. As far as social media, I cannot recommend them. Be careful and check out their own Facebook page. You’ll notice it’s not as cookie cutter as yours. They put a lot more effort into their own page to do it correctly (I didn’t say it was correct but it’s a bit better than what they do for their customers).
Do your homework, ask questions, define your goals, then make your decision. Cost is always a reason, yes, but if it can hurt your business, $1 is too much.
