Local marketing with Facebook

Patrick Stafford wrote a great piece yesterday on the rise and rise of location based marketing.

It’s a really important read for folks who have local businesses.

Another guy who really knows his stuff about location based marketing and Facebook is Ed Dale.

Dale posted a really interesting “find” yesterday on his Facebook page about how to target posts to fans by location.

Why’s that important?

Well it got me thinking about examples where it could come in handy.

Let’s say you’re a medium-sized national business with stores located here and there around the country.

You can post state-based offers and specials to fans who live in the state where the special is exclusively offered.

The problem in the past for franchises and businesses with multiple locations has been that they’ve often been forced to have multiple fan pages for each location.

It’s messy and there’s not much control or oversight possible for head office.

This new feature means you can have one fan page and post messages nationally, by state and in some cases by city.

Each administrator of the page can set up their posting to be super targeted at their patch.

Here’s how:

The first step is to create your post, but before you hit the share button select “Everyone”.

What you’ll see next is an option to “customise”… click that.

Then what you’ll see is a field for “Enter a country”, so you need to type in the name of the country or countries where you want the post to appear.

Once you’ve done that more magic appears. Yep, you get more options to super refine your locations right down to city or even town level.

So you can see how effective it can be posting from one fan page.

It solves multiple fan page issues, you can consolidate to a single page with multiple administrators self-servicing their own areas and a national administrator for national posts to all fans.

Thanks to Ed Dale for sharing this useful Facebook feature.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.