Did you ever imagine talking with your next door neighbor on a social networking site? The idea came to Nirav Tolia, a 40 something serial entrepreneur who started his career with Yahoo.
Like with all things online and social, this website will also present great opportunities for local businesses. Local SEOs are brainstorming over this trying to figure out the best way to use NextDoor.
NextDoor |
Tolia comes from the small town of Odessa, where the close knit families talk more than those enclosed in their multi million dollar mansions in uptown New York! The idea was to connect neighbors in a Community in every town and city, small or big, around the world. As a result, Nextdoor was launched in the fall of 2010. Back in March this year, the company had 1400 unique communities sharing information about local plumbers, baby sitters and doctors or donating extra furniture to someone in exchange for a unused lawn mower.
Essentially, NextDoor is a mishmash of Craiglist and Facebook. A member of the community who joins the network will see all the information shared by others within the community. Local SEO experts are helping Local Businesses benefit from the potentials of this gigantic community watering hole. Members will always have free access to the site and its information as long as they verify their address, but businesses might have to pay something to advertise on the pages. There are no indications of monetization as of now, so it remains to be seen whether businesses will have free access to communities or buy their way into them.
How NextDoor Community Members Use The Platform?
The co-founder's parents use NextDoor for neighborhood watch! After all, the platform is a huge gossip club where members can discuss anything from dinner to suspicious activities in their neighborhood and decide to inform authorities about it. Authorities on the other hand are using the service to build a safer, closer and amiable neighborhood.
In the 46 states where NextDoor is becoming popular, some use to organize parties, others to sell or buy products but mostly they use it to refer and recommend local professionals. Hence all the excitement among businesses.
However, there is a catch. No search engine is allowed to index information provided in the website. Hence, there is hardly any chance that anyone beyond the community will ever see a members-only page. The need is to come up with unique strategies, based largely on off page optimization, that will let local businesses reach large number of prospective buyers teeming around in the online communities of NextDoor.
How To Join Your Community's NextDoor Website?
Simple, just ask your neighbor to invite you by visiting the website. It is not necessary that your locality should have a website. If so is the case, start one and invite others to it. As word spreads, your website will have more members.
But if your neighborhood suffers from what Tolia calls ' Cricket chirping' syndromes, you will be disappointed. NextDoor is not interested in ghost town, hence it allows 21 days for at least 9 people to show up. Then NextDoor verifies their address by sending them postcards with codes in them. These codes when entered on the website allows the new member to start using these
The website has been developed to cater to small - large, urban - rural and affluent - low income neighborhoods alike.
Surplus Information Time
Nirav Tolia was behind many successful online ventures that mostly got acquired by large companies like IBM and Intuit. Currently he is heading a 32 member team at NextDoor and raised $18.6 million dollars in funds. We think in the future when the venture gathers steam, advertisers will be allowed and sponsored businesses will become common on NextDoor. Tolia hints at that when he says:
“We are not focused on monetization today, we are 100% focused on user adoption...we plan to do something that lets users derive more from the service”
Like with all things online and social, this website will also present great opportunities for local businesses. Local SEOs are brainstorming over this trying to figure out the best way to use NextDoor.
This post first appeared on Latest In Social Media Marketing, Reputation Management And Local SEO, please read the originial post: here
