Digital Mapping the Southcoast's Restaurants

Digital mapping can help develop key insights for businesses looking to locate influencers and content producers in a certain area.

The area nestled between Eastern Rhode Island and hugging the Atlantic ocean to the cape is known as Massachusett’s Southcoast.

The area is home to many communities such as Fall River, MA, New Bedford, MA, and Fairhaven, MA. These communities are also home to excellent restaurants, bars, and ice cream shops.

Scallops cook on the grill at the Blackwhale Restaurant in New Bedford, Massachusetts

There are many places the Southcoast offers to eat or drink, so I thought it might be helpful to digitally map out the restaurants in the area.

Digitally Mappy Locations

I used Google Maps to map out locations that I find worthy of a visit. These locations are based on my recommendations. I did not map any franchise restaurants and chose independently-run restaurants.

While making this map, I also used different categories to distinguish various places, including dine-in restaurants, take-out restaurants, bars, and ice cream shops. You can view the map below.

Locating Influencers to Map Connections

A new push from digital communicators focuses on turning to location-based analytics to precisely target their customers. Businesses can send alerts, advertisements, navigation aids, and enticements to customers when they are within the business’ location.

Other tools can identify and create a map of social media influencers in digital spaces as creepy as that is. I thought I try my hand to search for influencers in the Southcoast area.

Marketers can use tools such as Mentionmap.com to locate possible influencers on Twitter. The data proides expansive data, and can help increase a brands visibility by partnering with local influencers.

Mention Mapping the Southcoast

Businesses can use this information.com to demonstrate the people who are primarily using #NewBedford on Twitter.

I was surprised that the Southcoast of Massachusetts is not frequently mentioned on Twitter. Instead, the results feature more data from the United Kingdom’s Southcoast.

I also searched the area communities and found a tiny number of people and influencers discussing these communities. These folks also had relatively small followers.

While searching for #NewBedford, realtors, tattoo companies, and temporary work providers tend to be using #NewBedford frequently. A skincare company out of Florida also tends to use #NewBedford in their posts. These pages have a relatively small following. However, there was one influencer that appeared in my search.

I did find the New Bedford Guide, a for-profit social media re-poster with a sizeable digital following. If a company agrees to pay the New Bedford Guide, it could be a valuable platform to engage new audiences.

However, the New Bedford Guide frequently shares content that disparages immigrants and foreign nationals, criticizes the Black Lives Movement, and regularly uses clickbait and controversial headlines to increase clicks onto the site.

Anyone attempting to engage the New Bedford Guide should understand the social media’s audience and how they might perceive content.

Unreliable Searches

I attempted to use another popular New Bedford Hashtag, #NBMA. The results were not as expected.

Mention mapping proved to be quite unreliable. I found that it was difficult to find influencers in my area. I’m curious if the lack of results relates to the small usage of hashtags in our area, or if people just aren’t relying on Twitter anymore.

I attempted to search for #NBMA instead of #NewBedford and found a group of people using that hashtag to discuss something in Madrid, Spain.

While the tool provided a fascinating experience, it did not provide me with any real insight into what I searched for. I had to dig deep and search multiple hashtags and accounts to see what people mentioned on Twitter.

I also wonder how many people are actively using Twitter in this area, and the data I collect could be inconclusive.