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How To Setup Facebook for Multiple Store Locations

Have you been given the daunting task of restructuring your companies Facebook account and to ensure that all of your store locations are setup correctly? Lucky you ;)

 

We've seen so many large organisations get this wrong. It's something that we see so often we wanted to write this guide so we can always be helping people that might be a little lost on how to best achieve this daunting task.

If you're the lucky one who has been given this task, read on, we'll teach you our tips to ensure you get this done smoothly and that your management team are all high-fives and smiles by the end of the day.

Step one: Make sure you have access to your Business Manager account

Most of you probably already know to use Facebook Business Manager but I'm putting this step here just in case you inherited a page directly and were never introduced to Facebook business manager. What is it? Think of it more as a container for all of your Facebook assets. Pages, Pixels, Ad accounts, Audiences and Catalogues all can be managed from your business manager page. It allows you to more easily give access to your team and control permissions. There are plenty of guides online on how to set up your FBM but with Facebook constantly updating the tool its best to go straight to the source here.

Step two: Getting the data you need ready for locations

Okay so this step will look a little different based on what your starting point looks like. Have a think about the situation you're in, do you already have a bunch of individual pages for each store that you need to wrangle into a store network OR do you only have one page that serves your multi-store network?

 

Situation 1: I have all my pages already created, it's just a mess to manage right now.

Breathe a sigh of relief, you're almost there and you can skip step two.

Situation 2: I only have one account for all of my stores, help!

Before we get to Step 3 you're going to want to make sure you have all the data you need on each store. It's easier at this stage to create a page identity for each store and add the details. We'll link these up in Step 3. 

 

Step three: Decide which page will represent the BRAND.

In order for this whole 'network' of stores thing to work you need to have one page which will represent the entire brand. If you're an omnichannel retail business this will represent both your online store and your entire physical store network. This is where all your main campaigns and messages will originate. If you don't have such a page created, do that now. If you do have one, check that it doesn't have a physical address associated with it. The Brand is now everywhere and does not need a location.

Step four: Using Business manager to setup Locations.

Navigating-to-locations-in-facebookOnce you arrive at Store Locations you'll be greeted by this screen (as at May 2020):

Screen Shot 2020-05-20 at 11.16.50 AMThere's only one thing you need to do; click the green 'Get Started' button.

Now if you skipped a few steps you might be getting a warning that your main page has an address and that this address needs to be removed. For this to work, you absolutely need to ensure that your main (brand) page does not have an address in it.

Facebook has made it easy to remove this address right from this screen and if this is a thing for you it'll look like this:

removeaddress

Step five: Rounding up your locations

Once you are in the locations tab; the header menu looks like this:

Screen Shot 2020-05-20 at 11.28.58 AMAgain, be guided by the shiny green button that now says '+ Add Stores'.

You will than see this popup screen:

Screen Shot 2020-05-20 at 11.29.50 AMDepending on your situation earlier you're choices here might change. Generally speaking you would normally be choosing 'Connect a Page' if your stores had already created a page per store or you'll choose multiple stores if you've only ever had the one page for your entire store network.

 

Step six: A few last decisions to keep your social media management team happy

Screen Shot 2020-05-20 at 11.34.59 AMIf you want your Main page (brand page) posts to always show on each individual store page (recommended for Omnichannel retail) than you want to ensure 'Always show' is selected. 

If you have some very active store owners who like to ensure that all communications are personalised and localised to that area, then 'Only show on store Pages that don't publish their own posts' would be an option here. Be careful though; some of these stores might publish infrequent or less relevant content and your brand messages might not reach customers who follow their page and not the brand page.

Store Suggestions: In our view, if you want to drive foot traffic, you definitely want to allow this.

 

Step seven: Keeping your Paid Social team happy

You can group stores into 'Sets'. These allow the paid social media team to allocate budget to groups of stores. You may decide to do this based on a number of factors and it's usually best to discuss this with your paid media team (or agency) to figure out what's the best grouping for your needs. If you wanted to chat to a great agency about this, we just happen to know one... speak to the team here at alphawhale.

 

 

Nick Montagu
Nick Montagu
Nick is the Founder/CEO at alphawhale. He loves to dream big ideas and then break them down into *almost* impossible plans. Eats analytics for breakfast.

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