Creating Facebook Location Pages for your Brand

Getting Started

As with anything to do with social media, you need to be strategic. Firstly, you need to understand the pros and cons of location brand pages and how they can be used to enhance local marketing efforts and plan your activity. Secondly, it be time consuming moderating many individual location pages to ensure reviews, posts and comments are replied to so make sure you have the resources and team in place to manage this process.

Create location pages on Facebook

When you’re ready to execute your plan you’ll need to start creating the location pages. At this current moment in time you must speak to the Facebook Pages team so they can enable this feature for you. You might have spent ages looking for the locations functionality in the settings but it simply doesn’t exist as standard and therefore must be enabled manually by Facebook. Contacting Facebook is simple – if you’re an advertiser – just go into your ad account and click on Advertiser Support. If you don’t have an ad account then set one up for free. You’ll see one or many contact options depending on the time of day and what the Facebook support team can cope with. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to request an instant call back. If not, you’ll usually be able to have a live chat with someone or send an email. All you need to do is tell them to enable Facebook locations so you can create location pages to sit under your brand page. Once requested it can take up to a week for the locations functionality to appear.

Creating the pages and a few caveats worth considering

When creating the pages, there’s a few things you’ll need to consider. Firstly, make sure all the information is as accurate as it can be and include all the relevant details such as opening times as users will find this useful. Next you’ll have to enter a phone number. Don’t panic if you don’t have one as you can enter a fake one for now and remove it manually on the page’s ‘About’ tab. After you’ve created your location you’ll need to check the name – it usually takes the brand name with the location in brackets but often the location name can be taken from the wrong part of the address e.g. ‘London’ instead of ‘East Ham, London’ or a street name. You can easily edit the location details descriptor to accurately describe the location of the branch.

What about if I already have Facebook pages set up as local businesses?

I’m sure by now you will have realised that this is far from ideal, even if you are using the new Facebook business manager to handle multiple pages. Unless your company has local social media managers then the pros of individual managed pages are outnumbered by the cons. Don’t worry though, as you can convert an existing brand page into a location page in a similar way to adding them manually. You’‘ll see the ‘‘choose existing brand page‘’ function in the ‘Add Location’ dropdown.

If you’re worried about losing local marketing reach don’t be as your Facebook brand page allows for location-based post targeting.

Merging Facebook pages and likes

Facebook allows Page Admins to merge their pages if they are similar or duplicates. This merge transfers all the likes and check-ins from one page to another. The downside of any page merge is that all the existing user-generated-content such as reviews, posts and images will be deleted on the page that is being merged. All the content in the master page will remain. To request a merge you’ll need to submit a request to Facebook.

Facebook will have to manually approve your request but they tend to be pretty quick at sorting this.

That’s it! Your Facebook page now contains well structured location pages that sit under it. Here are some key considerations from my own personal experience.

You’ll need some hand-holding from Facebook

This location functionality is likely something Facebook is still building, hence the manual activation requirement. I had to speak to our Facebook advertising account manager a few times to get specific help. Maybe eventually they’ll roll the functionality out and make it a seamless experience but for now expect to need some hand-holding.

What are the benefits of Facebook location pages

There are a number of strong benefits and I would struggle to find counter arguments why multi-branch brands wouldn’t do this. The main benefit of course is the ability to link all the location pages to a master brand page where the social media marketing is carried out. The location pages serve as self-service local marketing pages where users can check-in, review and leave local-based feedback. Additionally, other benefits include:

• Focus (or merge) your page likes on one brand page, hence focusing your marketing efforts.
• You get an interactive map on the master page letting your users to find branches.
• Ability to see all local pages in a list with stats on page likes, reach and total check-ins.
• Less burden to manage local pages with individual content, although you can still do this.
• The pages are controlled by you, and not left unmoderated.
  All the location pages link back to the parent brand page.

Are there any downsides?

Monitoring many pages can be time consuming although leaving them unmonitored is much worse. Often when a user is checking into a place they see a number of user generated location pages, if there’s an official one then that’s the one they’re likely to check in to.

Another downside is that the functionality isn’t all that polished just yet. I already mentioned that it forces you to add a phone number but it can also be quite time consuming to sort all the pages because of how it’s built. The biggest downside if you’re merging pages is losing potentially years of content. However, even with these downsides it’s a step in the right direction and will lead to better marketing focus and ultimately user engagement and results.