Are you using social media to drive "real" traffic to your downtown?

Your position as a commercial district manager is about utilizing economies of scale. District management entities are in an excellent position to serve as the portal for social media - serving business owners who don't want to have to deal with learning how to effectively use and maintain relavent social media context. I came across a recent news article [Read more: How Eight Major Franchises Are Using Social Media For Customer Service] about how franchises are using social media for customer service. The same concept can and should be applied to commercial district managers in their social media efforts. Franchisees pay franchise operators for the marketing support they provide - making it easy for individual franchise owners to particate and benefit from the social media strategy that their corporate parents manage and maintain on their behalf. There is no reason that these strategies can't work for commercial district managers.

Some examples that are particularly appropriate include:

• Tasti D-lite offers "treatcards" that allow customers to accumlate points that can be redeemed at the store. This is linked to Foursquare and Twitter. Customers who register their card get extra points with every purchase.
• Dunkin Donuts offers occational specials and free items via it's Twitter account
• Church's Chicken launced a Twitter account. Customers who signed up were matched by a $1 donation to a pledge fund. This sounds like a great way to build a Twitter account quickly, and give to a local cause at the same time. I'm sure this could be leveraged to get some good local PR as well.

In general, these franchise operators are using Twitter and Facebook to send out marketing information, specials and other benefits on behalf of their many franchisees. The same concept can be applied to a commercial district social media strategy on behalf of its many businesses. Here are a few downtown's that have Twitter accounts for some ideas...

•  Downtown Alliance, New York, NY: http://twitter.com/downtownnyc (who wouldn't want to hear a choir at South St Seaport?)
• Downtown Boulder, Inc, Boulder, CO: http://twitter.com/downtownboulder (nice offer of 1 hour of free parking for those with holiday cheer!)
• Downtown Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA: http://twitter.com/dtla (I love the tweet for free tacos!)

Go ahead and post a link to your downtown twitter account for others to view!