Facebook Local Pages: The New Frontier for Multi-Location Brands

The Facebook platform

Facebook has for several years now been one of the most important arenas for all brands looking to optimize their online presence. A well-thought-out digital marketing strategy is unlikely to ignore the importance and power of the empire created by Mark Zuckerberg. The young American’s social network boasts an audience of as many as 1.66 billion users, a pool of potential customers that’s far from negligible when you consider the world population barely exceeds 7 billion.

Of these 1.66 billion, moreover, few today use the platform solely to hand out generous “likes” on photos of friends and family, or to share updates about their relationship status. More and more, Facebook is becoming a place where people go to search for and discover new brands, products and/or services. Proof of this can be found in the more than 60 million Business Pages already active on the social network.

Stores on Facebook

Are you on vacation in a city you don’t know and need a new pair of shoes? Search “shoes” on Facebook and a handy list of nearby stores that fit the bill appears. Want to find the electronics store with the best customer service in your area? Check the reviews left by other users on the pages of the stores nearest to you and head to the one with the best reviews.

Searches of this kind are increasingly common and easy to make, but unfortunately it’s not just as easy to appear among the results, and to appear in the right way. For brands with numerous stores, having a Business Facebook Page is no longer enough. The new frontier is Local Pages, and if the data doesn’t lie, everything points to consumer engagement being ever higher on these, and ever lower on regular corporate Pages.

Being geolocated (per individual store), Local Pages let users find the physical store closest to them in just a few clicks, with all the relevant information about it (phone numbers, opening hours, reviews from other users…). A bit like a Google My Business listing, but without ever leaving the Facebook platform. They also give brands the ability to create and promote content targeted at a local audience – small and specific – personalizing communication with their customers and making it more effective.

Local Pages

It’s now essential for all brands with multiple physical stores to create and, above all, manage their Local Pages with care and attention. According to the experts at MomentFeed, a useful motto to keep in mind for doing this well is “claim, clean, manage.”

One of the big problems with Local Pages, in fact, especially if a brand doesn’t own any official ones, is that they’re often created inadvertently by users who perhaps want to check in at a certain store or write a review about a specific store. These “fake” pages then continue to exist, without any supervision from the brand, yet appearing to whoever searches for it on Facebook as if they represented it.

It therefore becomes necessary to keep your eyes wide open to promptly identify these pages, which can easily gain a significant following, and once found, first of all to claim them – a step that allows you to keep the followers already gained without any effort – and then start managing them properly.

As for this last step, surveys show us that one of the most important elements for a Local Page is content generated by users themselves, whether reviews, comments, photos, videos or anything else. In fact, 93% of people say they often rely on content published by other consumers when making purchases or simply looking for information about a brand. Potential customers, naturally, trust the opinions of other users who have already had experience with a brand far more than advertising put out by the brand itself. The impact of online reviews, after all, is already well known…

It’s therefore a good idea to encourage users to share content on Location Pages, and also to interact with them, responding to comments (whether positive or negative), commenting on photos… and so on, creating a climate of dialogue between brand and consumer that will boost the popularity of Local Pages and the traffic on them, and will encourage other users to share content in turn. A vicious circle, but the kind we like. And so it continues: claim, clean, manage… to end up achieving great things, starting from local.

Claudio Agazzi, Founder & MD at RetailTune.ai