Facebook Places. Where you at?

Facebook Places. Where you at?

I love Facebook Places. I check in everywhere. With everyone. Sometimes I check people in that aren’t even there just to make them wish they were. Other times its a competition with my friends. Who can check us in first, who can tag the most people when we’re out at the bars.

Tom won this round…

I’ve actually had people meet up with us for lunch or drinks just because they saw the check-in. Needless to say, I have fun with it, but how can you use it for your business?

Well first off, you can make a place for your own business. Much like Foursquare, this allows you to promote your business through your followers by allowing them to check in and let their friends know they’re frequenting your establishment. You simply search for your business,  and then you can click on a link and go to a claiming flow where you can claim your business.

Now, you can start rewarding your customers with Facebook Deals. This basically works like Foursquare, where you offer different types of deals to your customers who check in at your page. This can be anything from a 50% off coupon, to something bigger for your most loyal (most often checking in) customers.

Once you figure out how you want to reward your customers, you offer a lot of incentive for people to check in at your business. As Facebook Places, Foursquare, and other similar applications have shown, everyone likes to let their friends know where they are, who they’re with, and what they’re doing. This is a great way to get some free promotions by letting your fans show all of their friends that they like your place, and with the inclusion of deals, you give them even more of a reason to check-in and tag all of their friends in the same location!

Assuming you already have a fan page, and you claimed your place, you can merge the two together. However, as mentioned before, there has been a lot of bugs with this process so choose wisely. Check out the official Unmerge My Page on Facebook, to see what problems other people are having with this. Merging your page is relatively easy, though obviously the problems are acknowledged. Facebook states “Certain features will not be supported after the merge.” So read up on it and decide whats best for your page

  • Kieran Murry

    What I have found in the last few days is that once you add your address to your page…it converts to a place. But all the same functionality of the page remains…with the added place cool stuff.

    • Stephen

      That is interesting. I guess Facebook is starting to integrate their features.