What?s your location marketing strategy for Facebook" How often do you update your pages" For many businesses, the answers are, ?I don?t have one,? and, ?Whenever we can.?
If you are one of those businesses, it?s time to take local presence on Facebook more seriously, because Facebook is taking some big steps to make itself a stronger platform for location marketing, especially on-demand commerce at a local level. Even better, Facebook is giving you tools to succeed on the world’s largest social network. You have to start using them.
Like clockwork, Facebook has been signaling a very clear move toward local marketing year after year. Let’s take a look at two prominent examples:
A little more than two years ago, Facebook rolled out local awareness ads to help businesses create customized ads locally through Facebook. One year later, Facebook upped the ante with two enhancements. First, Facebook made it easier for businesses with multiple locations to customize Facebook ad copy for different markets–a boon to any brand that needs to manage several local Facebook pages, whether you’re Nordstrom or Starbucks. Facebook also improved ad targeting at a local level by sharing (anonymous) insights about who is visiting local pages and responding to ads.
In October, Facebook added more tools that will capitalize on its scale to make the social media platform an even stronger location marketing hub, especially for on-demand ecommerce.
These include ...