How to Get Started With Facebook Places

What is Facebook Places?

Facebook Places is a “feature that allows you to see where your friends are and share your location in the real world. When you use Places, you’ll be able to see if any of your friends are currently checked in nearby and connect with them easily. You can check into nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit”.

Users can ‘check-in’ to a location using any GPS enabled device. It works along similar lines to Foursquare.

Users can tag other users into the location in the same way as they would if tagging a photo.

What it means for business

Businesses can advertise their Place Page in the same way as they advertise their Facebook Page. Interactions on a Places Page pushes a business name into the newsfeed of people checked-in or tagged in a check-in.

1. Add a Place for your business. This creates a Place Page.
2. Claim the Place Page on behalf of your business.
3. Update your business address, contact information, business hours, profile picture, admins and other settings.
4. Encourage people to check-in to your business.
5. Consider offering incentives to people who check-in.

Word of caution

There is nothing stopping people creating your home as a location and sharing that location with their friends. There appears to be no way to delete a place once it’s created. Although Facebook have provided functions to Flag a place the options provided don’t provide users with a way to delete a Place that they created.

For example, I added a Place then reported it. I could no longer check-in to that location on my iPhone but I could on my iPad.

Will this create a hyper-viral way to spread the news about parties? Will it cause more gate-crashing?