How many times have you seen a social media post and thought to yourself, “That is so relatable”? 

Want to know a secret?  

Relatability isn’t just reserved for funny memes and Twitter anecdotes. 

In fact, successful brands are relating to their audiences and driving more conversions with localized social media. 

When you adapt your social content to appeal to local consumers, you can forge deeper audience connections and boost brand loyalty. But what exactly do good local posts entail? 

Here’s everything you need to know about local social media marketing, including what it is, why it matters, and how to build a rock-solid strategy.  

Localized social media is social media content specifically geared toward an audience’s regional, cultural, and linguistic preferences rather than a broad set of general characteristics. This tailored content can be crafted to suit a specific city, region, community, or household by using locally relevant messaging, imagery, and references.  

Localizing your social media marketing enables your brand to better relate to and connect with your target audience. By speaking their language — figuratively and, in some cases, literally — you show consumers that you understand and identify with them, helping to build familiarity and trust.  

When you adapt your social media strategy to appeal to local audiences, you can expect major benefits for your brand. Here’s what you’ll gain through localization: 

• Accessing new markets: By creating regionally relevant campaigns, you can connect with audiences in markets previously unexplored by your brand.  
• Building trust: When you speak to the unique culture and characteristics of your audience, you form stronger relationships and build trust with local communities. 
• Enhancing brand reputation: Locally relevant content distinguishes your brand from competitors by showing consumers that you understand them, giving your brand a more favorable reputation. 
• Increasing engagement: Localized social media posts stand out in a sea of generic content, catching audiences’ attention and inspiring them to interact with your brand.  
• Gaining insights: By targeting local audiences, you can gather meaningful data and insights specific to those consumers, enabling you to better optimize future campaigns.  

When creating social media content for local consumers, there are four crucial components you should address to ensure every post, ad, or comment is optimized for regional relevancy.  

Here are the areas you’ll want to focus on. 

The linguistic element of social media localization goes beyond simply translating copy into the appropriate language (though proper translation is undeniably important). It also includes other aspects of language, such as tone, vernacular, and slang.  

For example, say your brand is promoting a sale on two-liter soft drinks. When localizing your messaging, the word you use to classify these goods matters — because different parts of the country refer to them by different names.

For example, if you were targeting a community in the North, you’d probably refer to the product as “pop.” In the far Western or Eastern United States, you’d say you were having a sale on “soda.” In the South, you’d call any carbonated soft drink a “coke” (even if it wasn’t Coca-Cola).  

You can also incorporate regional slang into your social media marketing. For example, “yinz” is a commonly used slang word in Pittsburgh, which refers to more than one person. Using this word in an ad would be a great way to connect with consumers within that city. 

Culture also plays a significant role when it comes to localization. A group’s culture refers to everything from local customs and references to holidays and humor. When you write to your local audience with these cultural components in mind, you show consumers you recognize and respect them. 

For example, a social media ad about Groundhog Day targeted toward consumers in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania — where Punxsutawney Phil makes his yearly weather forecast — would probably perform very well. However, targeting this same ad toward an audience in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where the weather stays warm year-round and a winter prediction wouldn’t mean much, likely wouldn’t resonate.  

Naturally, any local social media content you launch should be visually pertinent to your audience. That means using imagery, symbols, and colors that mean something to local consumers.  

For example, the Terminal Tower — the tallest building in Cleveland and a standout part of the city skyline — would be an excellent image to incorporate into a social media post geared toward Cleveland locals.  

It can be easy to forget to adjust your formatting when creating local social media content, but it’s something consumers will notice.  

What exactly does formatting entail? This component of localization includes items like dates, times, addresses, units of measure, and currency, as different countries use different formats for these elements.  

For example, the United States most commonly uses the month/day/year format when writing out dates, whereas a European country like Italy would order the date by day/month/year. 

If you’re a national brand, formatting elements like currency and date won’t matter quite as much as they would if your brand were global, but it’s still important to specify the proper time zones for each region.  

Now that you know the main components of localization, it’s time to start building your strategy. Follow these steps, and you can expect local engagement and trust to grow — and, in turn, conversions.  

In order to familiarize yourself with your intended local audience, you must start by conducting thorough research to determine: 

• Demographics: Audience demographics include details like location, gender, age, race, income, and education.  
• Culture: When learning about your local audience’s culture, look into language, customs, values, symbols, and norms.  
• Preferences: Does your audience prefer to consume content on their computers or mobile devices? What social media platforms do they use most? What kinds of content are they most interested in? 

Not sure where to find this information? There are various research tactics you can leverage to gather audience insights. Consider conducting community interviews, launching surveys, or using social media analytics tools to capture this information.  

When promoting your brand, every ad dollar counts. That’s why it’s crucial to determine where your local audience spends their time scrolling — because not all sites are created equal.  

Launch localized social media ads on the platforms that are most popular with your target audience. It’s important to note that you don’t need to be on every social media platform, but rather, the right social platforms for your target audience. 

When planning your social media content calendar, there are some tactics you’ll want to keep in mind when localizing your posts: 

• Use the right language: Leverage tone, humor, slang, and idioms that resonate with your audience. 
• Implement imagery: Choose visuals that incorporate locally relevant colors, symbols, and imagery. 
• Get with local trends: Post about trending topics and utilize local hashtags.  
• Cover timely topics: Boost your reach by creating timely posts around local news, events, and holidays.  
• Monitor consumer mentions: Share user-generated content highlighting local consumers using or praising your products or services.  
• Schedule your posts wisely: Schedule your posts for when your local consumers are most active, taking time zone differences into account. 

When it comes to your local social media strategy, local influencers are your friends. These small-scale public figures are both known and trusted in local communities, making them the perfect partners with whom to collaborate. By partnering with a local influencer, you tap into that figure’s existing audience while quickly gaining favor, credibility, and trust by association.  

When choosing an influencer to collaborate with, it’s important to partner with one whose area of influence overlaps with your industry. For example, if you’re an athletic shoe brand, a fitness influencer would probably be a better fit than a gaming or beauty influencer.  

Here are a few ways you can collaborate with local influencers: 

• Sponsored posts: Sponsor an influencer post where they showcase your product on their page. 
• Contests and giveaways: Provide an influencer with products to give away on their accounts.  
• Account takeovers: Let an influencer post from your brand’s social media account for a day. 

Once you’ve created and launched your local social media marketing strategy, it’s important to measure how these campaigns are performing. When you track the right metrics, you can better determine what’s working, what’s not, and how you can optimize your strategy.  

The following metrics are excellent indicators of local post and ad performance: 

• Impressions: Impressions show how many people have been exposed to your posts on their feeds, so you can see if your content is reaching your target audience.  
• Engagement: You can measure engagement rate by tracking the number of likes, comments, and shares on your posts. 
• Clicks: When evaluating your social media ads, clicks will tell you the number of times consumers clicked on a link. 
• Conversions: Your conversion rate is the percentage of consumers who completed a desired action, such as booking a demo, downloading a resource, or signing up for a newsletter. 
• Followers: How many followers you gain within a specific period of time is a great indicator of social media performance.  
• Sentiment: Are users talking about your brand on social media? Does it seem like their perception is positive or negative?  
• Sales: Increased purchases — either online or in-store — could be an indication that your localized social posts are working.  

While social media localization isn’t an exact science, there are some tips and best practices you can follow for better results: 

• Repurpose existing content: If you have social content that’s performed particularly well for your broader audience in the past, consider repurposing it for local consumers by localizing elements of the original content. 
• Ensure brand consistency: Just because you’re tweaking your social content for your local audience doesn’t mean you should lose the essence of your brand. Incorporate a local voice while still staying true to your brand image. 
• Choose flexible themes: Try creating content themes you can easily adapt to multiple locations to minimize lift.  
• Manage posts for compliance: Not all locations have the same compliance and privacy laws. That’s why it’s vital to pay attention to these standards for every region you market to. 
• Leverage AI: Consider using AI tools to customize your local content at scale.  

When it comes to your local social media marketing, you need a distributed growth platform designed to help brands drive results across their channel networks at scale. Ansira has over 100 years of experience empowering major brands to amplify their brand-to-local marketing.  

Get in touch with one of our experts to learn more.