What Does Hyper-local Advertising On Facebook Mean For You?

By Author: Allen Hill
Total Articles: 136
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The digital advertising landscape witnesses change every few months as online communication and technology continuously evolve to smarter forms. Digital marketers like AMGW, one of the leading advertising and marketing agencies in Miami, FL, keep an eye out for the latest trends and updates in their search for new opportunities of connecting with potential customers in innovative ways. One of the most watched platforms is Facebook, which has more than a billion users. Online advertisers have jumped onto the Facebook advertising bandwagon with much enthusiasm. First they started with sponsored ads in the sidebar. Gradually, they entered the News Feed with promoted posts. Recently, they were able to merge themselves seamlessly into the News Feed with in-line sponsored posts. Now a newly launched feature will help them become even more personal with Facebook users.

Facebook launched the feature of ‘Nearby Friends’ a few days back. This feature allows users to locate friends in their vicinity through location updates on Facebook. The intended purpose of this feature is to encourage serendipitous meetings between friends ...
... in the real world. People can plan ad-hoc to meet up when they find each other close by. Users need to turn on the ‘Nearby Friends’ features themselves, after which their location will be constantly updated to a certain degree of accuracy. The feature will also allow Facebook to customize the News Feed for users so that they are able to view more posts from people, places and events nearby.

While the ‘Nearby Friends’ feature is meant to connect the real and virtual worlds, the collection of data related to users’ location could hold huge advantages for marketers in the future. Geo-targeted advertising is already a widely used technique, which allows amgwagency.com to show region-specific ads according to the IP location of users. However, the fact that many people use Facebook on mobile devices on the move brings a new twist to the game. Now, digital advertisers can potentially take advertising to a hyper-local level where users might be seeing ads of places and businesses within walking distance from them.

Hyper-local advertising could bring many benefits to especially brick-and-mortar businesses, which have not been able to justify their spending on online advertising for a vague group of consumers. A question they commonly ask is, "What is the use of advertising to a person sitting miles away in a different city, or even country, when we have a physical outlet at only one location?" However, advertising to people, who are just a few blocks away, makes more sense to them as the chances of conversion rise exponentially. In the future, if Facebook shares user locations with online advertisers, (recent statements imply that they will), then small businesses from cafés, clubs and chiropractors to patisseries, plumbers and physiotherapists will be able to target potential customers with a more efficient and ROI-oriented online advertising plan with the help of one of the leading advertising and marketing agencies in Miami, FL, AMGW.

Hyper-local advertising on Facebook will also be more advantageous to users as they will be seeing more relevant ads that might be of actual help to them.