Facebook continues to help businesses have a larger presence on their platform with the latest changes to the Facebook Locations framework. Facebook Locations (formerly known as Parent-Child) connects all of a brand’s local Facebook pages to one “national” or main page.
We wrote about the last series of changes for Facebook locations in June 2015 and, since then, the platform continues to evolve in its focus on individual local business pages over one corporate page.
Facebook Locations now offers businesses the option to cascade content from a businesses’ main Facebook page to all of their local pages. This option can be found by going to your main page, clicking on Settings, then Locations and at the bottom, you will see the option to cascade posts to your local pages.
The three options given for how the posts are cascaded are: A) have the corporate posts show up on each and every local Facebook page for your business, B) have the corporate posts show only on local pages that do not already publish their own posts (default option), or C) never show posts from the corporate page to the local pages.
There is also the option to tailor the cascading posts for each page. By clicking on the pencil icon at the far right next to each page in the Locations list, the following option is provided at the bottom of the Edit Location menu pop up window:
By unclicking the Posts option, the posts from the corporate page will not show up on that location’s page. If you choose this option, any posts that had been previously cascaded down to that location will automatically be removed.
We here at Reshift Media are big fans of any Facebook update that allows businesses to easily personalize their individual pages and that encourages local engagement with their customers. However, this update is still not a perfect solution, as:
- All of the posts that cascade from the main page clearly look like they come from corporate, instead of looking like they originate from the local page.
- Any posts cascaded through this option either go to all the locations set up to receive posts or none of them. This means that you can’t target posts to only show up on a specific group of pages in a given region or by any other differentiation.
- Each post is considered “shared” between the main page and the different locations so each post will share the same metrics including the number of likes, shares, and comments. There will be no way to analyze how posts are doing on each of the different pages.
- There is no way to monitor all the customer comments to the posts without going to each individual local page. There is also no way to set up alerts to notify you when comments are posted except by manually setting up notifications from each local page.
To ensure businesses do not have to worry about these obstacles, we at Reshift Media have developed proprietary software called Social Brand Amplifier™, which allows companies to cascade content to any group of their locations they choose and for that content to appear as if it’s coming from the local page. The Social Brand Amplifier also provides both analytics and monitoring tools for all of your local pages.
To learn about how our Social Brand Amplifier can help your multi-location business, email us at [email protected].
Hi Jim, it’s been a month since I began trying to create a “parent” business page for the three “child” business pages that I manage for a company. I know Facebook requires them all to have the same name, but when I try to change the names to the same one, Facebook blocks the attempt and says I already manage a page by that name and to try something else. I haven’t received any good help at all from Facebook on this, despite numerous requests and “open cases.” Do you know someone at Facebook that can help? I keep seeing others with the same problem on message boards (including here at ReShift), and the answer is always “ask tech support.” We’d love to cascade content from a main page, one of these days.
Hi Eugene,
Yes, we can help. Please contact [email protected] to learn more about our services.
Take care,
Jen