Managing numerous local Facebook Pages for business

For businesses that have numerous locations, until recently, it has been a frustrating experience managing and maintaining a Facebook social presence that account for each location. Basically, businesses had two options: 1. keep only the primary, corporate Facebook Page and ignore the local instances of the business or 2. create and operate a separate Facebook Page for each location of your business in addition to the corporate Page.

Fortunately, Facebook launched a new feature to help alleviate this problem. The new feature Parent-Child allows businesses to easily claim, administrate, and manage places pages and check-in deals for brands with more than five locations. This helps make social media marketing less of a burden for larger organizations.

Some of the great benefits of Parent-Child include:

• Locations Tab: list all of your retail locations under a single tab
• Manage Deals: push a single check-in deal to every location through the parent Facebook page
• Assign Admins: allow your local location managers or business units to run their own Place page, while giving the parent organization control over the corporate brand
• Consistent Branding: create uniform descriptions and meta data, along with a single profile image--unifying the corporate brand identity at one fell swoop