When you’re running a business that has multiple locations, it can sometimes be hard to juggle all of them online. However, it’s important to recognize why you should have separate listings for each of your locations, so you will put forth the effort to get them all showing up online:
Be Found Online
Everyone wants their business to be accessible to customers and potential customers. You shouldn’t let yourself fall through the cracks when someone is looking for your industry in your area, simply because you don’t have listings available for all of your locations. You want to be seen as much as possible online, and creating social pages and platforms for each of your locations is a great way to achieve that.
Drive Business to all Locations
Too often, small business owners only list their flagship, or first, location online. Why not ensure that you are driving as much business as possible to all of your locations? It’s too simple of a task and too important to just let it go. Drive business to all of your locations by ensuring that they all have listings online and they are all showing as frequently as possible.
Get Positive Reviews
That’s right! People can’t leave a positive review for a location that is non-existent online. You can avoid losing these potentially positive, business-building reviews by having each of your locations accessible online. Don’t miss out on a good review because you forgot to, or didn’t want to, list your locations on social media.
So how can you be sure you’re correctly managing all of your locations on social media? Well, it doesn’t need to be as hard as it sounds! Here are some tips for the major social platforms when it comes to managing multiple locations:
Google+
Google+ makes it really easy for you to list multiple locations. All you need to do, is visit Google Places, and login to or create an account for your business. You can list all of your locations with their corresponding contact information into a file (.csv, .txt, .xls, .tsv, .xlsx and .ods) and upload them all at once! You will need to verify each location, but it’s really simple and definitely worth it.
Facebook makes this pretty easy for business owners, as well. Since they umbrella your business listings under your personal page, you can create and manage them all under one login. When you create your first business page, it will be accessible to you through your personal page. You can proceed to create pages for each of your different locations and access them the same way. Again, Facebook is an extremely popular platform and it’s important that you list each of your businesses there.
Yelp
Yelp doesn’t make the process quite as easy for you, but it’s still pretty important that you get all those locations listed there. Yelp offers a tool that allows you to manage multiple locations, however you do have to pay for that service. The best workaround for Yelp, unfortunately, is to create separate listings for each of your locations. However, don’t let this discourage you because it will pay off in the long run!
There’s really no getting around the internet when it comes to business. You need online profiles to help your business grow and in order to sustain them. Use these tips to help you set up social profiles for each of your locations as you expand your business!
For more insights on marketing strategy that actually works for small business, subscribe to the FreshLime Newsletter here. Connect with Jay Bean, Founder of FreshLime and Small Business Marketing Expert on LinkedIn and Twitter. And last of all, if any of these tips have helped you or if you have anything to add please comment below. We’d love to hear from you!