How to manage Facebook pages for a multi-location business

A Facebook page can be very useful for a business with multiple locations, either nationally, or internationally.

Here’s how to customise each feature for your business.

Facebook has evolved into a very appealing platform for business owners the past for years and anyone can benefit from it, whether it’s the smallest local business to the biggest international company.

There is a struggle with businesses having more than a few locations, either nationally or internationally on how to handle its presence on Facebook, but the platform offers a solution for every case.

Facebook introduced a few years ago the idea of multiple locations, or else, the ability to add more than one location to your own page, in order to promote each local store more effectively.

As local marketing becomes more popular, Facebook created this feature to facilitate both customers who look for a local store, but also business owners who want to reach a new and local audience.

This has offered a useful segmentation for business owners and despite its challenges, it has already benefited many companies.

How to set up multiple locations on Facebook

The first step is to request access to Facebook’s Locations for your Page and you can do it through this link.

Once your request is approved, you can visit your Page’s Settings and find Locations, where you can set up your new Location Pages.

You can even link existing Pages and it’s important to note that all Location Pages must have the same name, which leads to identical pages, along with their specific location.

Facebook Multiple Locations: pros and cons

Pros

Increased visibility: a built-in map and a store finder allow any business to increase its online visibility, while the improved accuracy in the location data boost its local marketing potential.

Consistent branding (Read more...) it’s quite convenient that every new place page automatically obtains the cover photo and the profile picture, which contributes to a more consistent branding

Taking control of duplicate pages – Location pages allow a business to manage any page that might have been created from users for a particular store.

Admin access to all pages – The admins of the main Page have access to all the “child” pages, which avoids multiple logins and the time-consuming process of managing different pages.

Cons

Still problems with users creating pages: even if a business owner claims a fan created local page, this doesn’t mean that users cannot create new ones in the future, which means there need to be constant monitoring to ensure that the business is properly represented among all areas.

Problems when claiming a page: There is a difference between creating a location page and claiming an existing one and the main problem is the fact existing place pages cannot receive the name, address, phone data updates and also cannot have automatic updates to the cover photo and the profile picture.

This can be very annoying for a popular business, as it creates problems that new location pages wouldn’t have.

No automatic posting: It would be ideal if a post to the Parent page was automatically published to the Child pages, but unfortunately this is not happening.

Also, the insights of each child page are not reflected to the Parent page.

Approval process: Not every business owner was able to get access to Location pages and there was a speculation whether this feature is more destined for bigger Facebook spenders.

As it is not the most popular Facebook feature, though it’s still useful, we’d suggest you try it out on your own before reading about others’ cases regarding the approval.

Facebook Global Pages for an international presence

Facebook’s Global Pages are extremely useful for international companies with a worldwide audience, as they allow you to create “localised” pages, with Global Page still acting as the main one.

This could be a more organised way to manage multiple different Pages all over the world, while it allows a business to narrow down the audience by country, region, or language.

With just one URL, a business can promote its Facebook presence, while users will be redirected to the custom page, depending on the location, or the language.

Creating a Global Page

The first step is to create a Page that will serve as your Global one. If you already have a Page, it might be a good idea to create some new Pages depending on your target markets, in order to start understanding the concept of Global Pages.

The next step is to contact Facebook, in order to start the process of launching a Global Page.

Once you get the approval, you follow the next steps:

Go to your Page
Go to Settings
Click the Global Pages tab
Add a Page
Set targeting preferences, including which countries and languages you want mapped to that Page.
Click Save Changes

Global Pages offer both management and insights advantages, as a dashboard allows you to plan your global strategy for your brand.

Is your company suitable for Global Pages?

All active advertisers are suitable for Global Pages, but this doesn’t mean that every business should obtain them.

Global Pages can be very effective for international companies that have a target audience in multiple locations, trying to approach each region in a more personalised way, by still having one dashboard for their management.

This means that there’s also an increasing need for content and community management, as every page still counts as a standalone page for the target audience and thus, it also increases the company’s marketing budget.

A global marketing strategy needs to take into consideration all the aspects of Global Pages and whether the company can really keep up with its management on a daily basis.

If you still feel confident about your business and its international prospects, then Global Pages can be extremely beneficial by splitting your audience, depending on the country, the region, or the language, still by having the admin control through one big Page.

The easiest way to spot Pages that belong to a Global Page

If you’re wondering which companies use Global Pages as part of their global marketing strategy, you can simply explore their Facebook Pages, click on “More” and see whether there’s the option to “Switch Region”.

This is an easy way to monitor how your competitors may use Global Pages and what type of content they are localising for each region.

Coca Cola for example has multiple different regions, due to its popularity all over the world and the need for localised content in various locations.

Target specific audience in your Facebook Page with Audience Optimisation

If your business doesn’t have a great number of locations, or a big enough international audience to try out the Global Page, it may still be useful to experiment with the idea of Audience Optimisation when targeting a custom audience.

Facebook introduced earlier this year the feature of Audience Optimisation for publishers, which allows every Page manager to post content on the page, by narrowing down the audience in the most relevant way.

The audience restriction makes a post visible only to the specific audience, based on the location, the language, the age, or the gender. This may not increase the reach, but it manages to increase the engagement, as relevance is always an important factor for Facebook’s users (and also the ever-changing news feed algorithm)

What’s more, there’s also the option to target down an audience based on the interests, while publishers add the right interest tags on the required fields to increase the relevance of the post for their audience.

How to use Audience Optimisation

Audience Optimisation is currently available to English language Pages and if your Page has more than 5000 likes, the feature might be automatically turned on.

If it’s not, then you need to follow the next steps:

Go to your Page.
Click ‘Settings’
Click ‘General’
Find the row labeled ‘Audience Optimization for Posts’ in the middle of the page and click ‘Edit.’.
Check off the box that that allows you to begin using the feature.

Audience Optimisation can be useful from the smallest to the biggest audience, as it manages to send the content to the right audience, provided that the optimisation is successful, which means that it stands out from the crowded irrelevant posts for each user, also increasing the chances of being shown to the news feed.

As Facebook keeps evolving, there are many tools that business owners can find effective, with experimentation being more than encouraged, always by taking into consideration the general marketing strategy for the business, the goals and the expectations from the Facebook Page.

Tereza Litsa is a Writer at ClickZ.