This is the first post of a series of four posts that will help you grow and gain more brand recognition by having a local presence online. By “local presence” we mean that every single location has a presence on Facebook, Google, Apple maps and Foursquare.

We often hear companies saying “Oh, we already do Facebook!”, but many companies don’t understand the importance of correct data, and what they actually are missing out by “doing Facebook” incorrectly.

Be in control of your online presence

Let's face it, if your customers can’t find your locations on Facebook, the locations might as well not exist. Worse yet, if they find misleading information it can cause them to lose faith in you or choose a competitor instead. Facebook locations also support geo-tagging of Instagram photos, which is a huge marketing opportunity for your business as well. You really don’t want to miss these opportunities!

Having Facebook and Instagram set up properly so that all your locations are represented enables your customers to tag photos, make comments, check-in, like, and rate and review your locations. All of these activities can generate huge amounts of viral exposure for your brand, as well as increased brand recognition and new customers.

“Unofficial pages” issues and how they affect your business/company

You might have spent some time clicking around on Facebook and stumbled upon a page that looks like yours, but it says “unofficial page” at the top and you have no access to it. That’s what we call a “duplicate”, a page that is created by a Facebook user and you have no control over it even though it represents your brand.

In this case, you should be a little bit worried cause these pages and locations could hurt your brand and mislead customers with wrong information and even worse, they can get REALLY popular. While it’s really important to remove or claim them, they can be very hard to find and even harder to get rid of.

Another thing we usually hear is “We don’t change our opening hours or address often, so why do we need to monitor that on Facebook?” The problem is that whether you change the opening hours or not by yourself, the information might change online either way.

Facebook allows users to “suggest edits”. That means that anyone can suggest changes to your opening hours, phone number, web address, etc… While Facebook keeps a tight lid on how or why edits are accepted, we know that some get accepted and you will unlikely get informed.

How often does this happen? Well, our clients have updated their pages over 76,000 times in the past 7 days, so pretty often…

You could also use Facebook for free marketing if you use it correctly.

Have you ever gotten advice from a friend about a movie or restaurant? The same happens on Facebook and you can encourage it by creating plain old-fashioned free Facebook posts and posting them on each and every page of yours to get people talking. Every time someone tags a friend or mentions them in a comment on your post that's viral sales that work for you!

If this made you eager to boost your business using Facebook location pages, it should. Contact us and we can discuss how to properly set up Facebook for your company. We’re always a mail away at Hello@PinMeTo.com!