Users who find Pages and Places they like can decide to recommend them to friends, via a feature that Facebook appears to be in testing on a handful of accounts. In an example spotted by Kevin Evanetski of Social Yeah, the “Recommend This Place” feature appears in a right-hand module, and asks users to “Help your friends discover great places to visit by recommending this” (leaving a supporting comment in the module).

If users choose to make the recommendation, their comment will appear in the module, and post as a wall and news feed story.

Although the wording here is for “Place,” the box is appearing on what appears to be a merged Place/Page for a San Francisco Bay Area radio station, Sports Radio 95.7 FM. Given Facebook’s other efforts to unify Places and Pages, as well as the current feature similarity of the two types of pages, this feature could also be introduced for Pages that don’t have Places functionality.

Doing so would add on to the existing Page recommendation feature, which allows Page administrators to suggest their own Page to users. That feature was adjusted last month from showing recommendations in the friends requests page and the now-gone home page Requests panel, instead showing recommendations in a “Recommended Pages” module. Previous iterations of the feature have experimented with how to allow users and Page owners to share the Page recommendation, with a separate option for users to share Pages being removed earlier this year.

While it’s up to users to make use of this new feature, Page owners should consider ways of encouraging sharing without breaking Facebook’s terms against incentivizing social actions, such as creating special Places and Pages within a brand, that are especially likely to attract recommendations.

For deep analysis of Facebook’s organic distribution features, as well as weekly profiles of innovative marketing campaigns, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook.