Facebook Places, Locations Coming Out of Beta

As the social world advances, consumers are turning more to location-based social networks to showcase their favorite places and redeem deals for checking-in. There have been discussions among Facebook Developers the past few weeks regarding the new features being released for Places and Pages that began rolling out on July 13th. These features are designed to help brands establish a more localized presence on Facebook, while also making the experience more useful to the Facebook community. However, there are limitations in not providing a custom experience for consumers. These new features will be rolled out to pages automatically and follow the previous set-up of parent-child relationships.

Brands will be able to see features of these new releases in 5 areas:

1. Locations Tab: The new locations tab has appeared on main parent pages. This tab automatically loads nearby locations for a user and also allows for users to search for locations by zip code. For brands there is the ability to move this tab up, down or to remove it totally. Currently this tab is in beta but once fully functional users will be able to find locations. When determining if this tab will meet brand objectives for a store locator, a good parallel question to ask is “Does the info tab suffice in telling my brand’s story?” If not, and you have a custom Welcome tab or About tab, then chances are, you’ll also want to have a custom branded store locator; as brands will quickly discover, functionality with Locations is limited, and look & feel is locked at Facebook/Bing, as we can see from the Papa Johns Locations tab.



2. Parent-Child Linking: For each Place that is designated as a child page there will be a link under the page name to the parent page. For a brand this will prove valuable because there is a background linking architecture and a difference between official can unofficial Places Pages. This linking architecture will most likely have an effect on searching on Facebook and search engines.
3. Check-In Aggregation: When a user checks-in to a place, all check-ins from child Places pages will be aggregated to the parent page. This will present a more accurate picture of the brand’s social geo-local footprint.
4. Mass Places Management: Parent pages will have administrative access to their child Places and also appear as an admin for every Place. Only the parent page will be able to remove themselves as an admin and grant administrative access to franchisees. Community managers will now have a way to control individual locations but also a way to empower franchisees and regional managers to become more involved in Facebook, as we can see below within the Locations back-end Facebook interface for Chapters Indigo.



5. New Pages API Features: Brands will now be able to edit many Places at once using new features in the API. The editable areas include wall settings, custom tabs, and Check-in Deals. It is currently unclear if Facebook is going to be providing an interface to manage locations in bulk or if they are simply allowing the APIs to be open for developers to leverage on behalf of brands. If the latter, then brands will definitely want to sync with their Facebook PDC account representatives or Social AOR to discuss development of a custom Places Management interface.

These updates will allows brands to gain more from the Parent-Child and Places experience and increase the control that they have over individual Places in a time efficient manner. However, for many brands to stay innovative in the social space it will be necessary to develop custom applications the tie in multiple locations while allowing users to filter the information that is most important to their experience. As soon as the changes to Places come out of beta keep an eye out for an update here on the final social business impact for brands and their Places presence.

This post can originally be found on the Dachis Group Collaboratory.