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Five Ways Multi-Location Businesses Can Prepare For Facebook Graph Search

As Facebook Graph Search rolls out, brands targeting local customers will start to see new opportunities to be found by potential customers and to find people who might be receptive to local marketing messages.

The granular nature of Facebook Graph Search results (filters by people, places, interests, photos, etc.) will likely encourage people to use the service for local discovery.  So local content (aka “keywords”) and local relationships (aka “Friends”) will be critical for businesses that want to be discovered.

Here are five things any multi-location business can do to get ready:

1. Make sure you have a unique Facebook location Page for each of your business locations.  This will make them more likely to show up for local Graph searches.  Be sure to have an accurate name, address, phone number and website link on each of these pages.  And definitely make sure you have the keywords you think people will be searching for on your pages.

2. Regularly add local content to each Facebook location Page.  Restaurants should have up-to-date menus, and make sure each menu item has a “like” button. Retailers should have available products.  Regularly updated events and promotions are also great ways to get valuable keywords on your Facebook Place Pages.

3. Offer promotions to Facebook users who have large numbers of local connections.  The activity of these super-Friends are more likely to show up across a wide number of local Graph searches (as long as these are not spammy accounts).

4. If you are generating local content on your website or via an app, make sure that you are using Facebook’s Open Graph to allow people to post to Facebook via your app.  This will provide more opportunities for you to rank for various Graph searches.

5. Get lots of “Likes” from locals.  Encourage people to share, like and comment on your service.  The more recommendations, the more likely you are to show up when a person is searching Facebook Graph for friend recommendations.  When it comes to Graph Search SEO, it seems like Likes are the new Links.
1 comment about "Five Ways Multi-Location Businesses Can Prepare For Facebook Graph Search ".
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  1. Pete Austin from Fresh Relevance, August 1, 2013 at 2:53 a.m.

    I don't know any local business that does this sort of thing for Google, despite it being heavily used for a lot of local searches, so I assume the ROI is not good enough. The suggestions for Facebook sound expensive. Has anyone done the math, to decide whether they make business sense?

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