Facebook Locations

Over the last few years, Facebook has been rolling out several tools to help multi-location and franchise brands use their network more effectively. Facebook Locations (formerly known as Parent-Child Pages) was one of these tools that brought a lot of great features to these larger brands.

If you are not familiar with Locations, it essentially allows brands to gain access to or create Facebook pages for every business location. Once activated, brands can choose to unify their branding by pushing matching profile pictures, banners, page descriptions, URLs, and phone numbers to each of their brand’s local store locations. One of the features many brands love is a new map that gets added to every location page showing each user the location nearest to them based on their current location. This has been a huge step forward for brands trying to maintain consistency on social media.

Along with the great benefits that Locations brought, there have also been some major downfalls.

Posting Through Facebook Locations

When Locations rolled out it also gave the ability for brands to push content posted to the corporate page to each local page. While at first this seems like the best feature of the entire tool, most brands failed to understand what was actually happening with their content. Most multi-location marketers we speak with are under the impression that fans of each local page will see those posts in their timeline… but that is not how Locations works.

What actually happens is the post is placed on the local page, but is never pushed out to the audience. This means, if Locations is the only tool you use to post to local pages, none of the fans of those pages ever see your content unless they visit the actual page. As any good Facebook marketer knows, the News Feed is where content gets viewed, and if your local pages want to be seen, that is where their content has to be.

How Local Posting Should Work

If your brand is serious about a local marketing strategy through Facebook, the only way to accomplish that is by posting to each location page independently. If you have time to do this, your brand is okay with the same content posting to all local pages, and you have budget for a posting platform, there are several great tools that can help, such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite. However, you will still be required to take time to create each post and select the pages where you want to post.

The ideal way to do this would be to actually have a local strategy for each store and publish local, unique content to each of the pages. This is not only going to make your brand look better locally, it will give you the maximum reach and engagement at the local store level.

This is the strategy we have embraced at Social Joey, for two reasons:

1. The Internet is made up of people. Social media is just that: real people looking at your business online.

2. All business is local. It does not matter if you are a single small business or a multi-unit business or franchise, people are spending money at the local store level, and they are far more likely to engage with what is going on in their community than anything else on social media.

If you are a multi-unit business using Facebook Locations to publish content and are interested in looking at a true hyperlocal social media strategy give us a call or send over an email. With our proprietary software platform and our team of writers, designers, editors, strategist and ads specialist, we can help you develop a local presence at an affordable price and help your business and your local stores shine on social.