Facebook for Multi-Location Brands

When your brand is represented by not just a brand page, but dozens, hundreds, or thousands of location pages for brick and mortar locations, managing it all becomes tricky. 

First, you need to have access to all of these pages in such a way that makes it easy to give your stakeholders the access they need. As with Google Listings, having access to your entire estate is important for making sure customers can find up-to-date information about your business.

But depending on your organisation's structure, how you approach this changes. Working with Facebook or any third party platform, Business Manager will be crucial. Below, we’ll look at how your Facebook page access should be structured in a Business Manager, based on the following two scenarios. 

1. A large franchise or brand that directly owns and operates each location.
2. A symbol group with many individual stakeholders that own their respective locations.. 
   

Scenario One: Brand-Owned Pages

To manage multiple locations directly owned by your brand, you should claim ownership of the pages directly owned and operated by your business. To do this, you’ll need to get the URLs of all your pages. Then, within your business manager, use the “Add a Page” Option to claim ownership of the page. You’ll need to use this option for each page you’re claiming ownership of. 

Ideally, you should already be a page admin. If so, your ownership requests will be automatically approved. Once pages are owned by your central business manager, you can then assign pages to different team member en masse. It also keeps access to these pages secure for the business if staff turnover. 

Scenario Two: Franchisee-Owned Pages

For a symbol group, the steps are similar, though instead of claiming ownership of the pages, as they belong to their respective business owners, you use the “Request access to Page” option. This sends a notification to the page admins, who then need to approve your request. Once approved, you’ll be able to access these pages through your Business Manager and assign them the same way as the example above. 

For location owners and page admins, your business manager will be listed as an Agency on the page, allowing for ownership to sit under the location owner. Stores with their own Business Manager can use your Business ID to add your HQ Business Manager as a partner and share pages with you this way. 

This means both you and the location owners can be productive in sharing pages and assets, allowing both parties a greater level of collaboration for greater success through Social Media Marketing.

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To Conclude...

It’s important to bear in mind what level of access and who has access to your pages. By putting these structures in place, you protect the location owners, the HQ users, and the brands overall presence on Facebook. 

It also makes managing integrations with third party platforms far easier, by assigning these pages to specific users to connect them to said platforms. We’d recommend sorting pages into “business asset groups” in your business manager, which allows you to assign them en masse. 

There will be more articles posted over the next few weeks as part of the 'THE SET-UP SERIES' delivering practical and organisation tip for page organisation.

Chat soon,

SL