Facebook Deals, the company’s Groupon-style pre-paid coupon service, has now been live in beta for almost three months. While it so far hasn’t achieved the instant success some expected, Facebook has been cautious with promotion of the product rather than spam its news feed with Deals announcement.

Deal quality and usage has been relatively low, from what we’ve seen, but the company is also continuing to refine the product and launch to more cities, as it explains below.

Overall, the revenue potential for Facebook Deals is still promising, especially when you consider that the company wouldn’t need to buy ads promoting it — a major cost for other pre-paid coupon providers active on the platform, like Groupon and Living Social. Here, we’ll look at how the product is evolving, and what its best prospects are for gaining traction.

Taking It Slow

In March, Facebook began showing news feed stories asking users to sign up for updates about Deals in San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, Austin and Atlanta. Facebook is both arranging its own deals and aggregating offers from deal providers including Home Run, OpenTable, and Gilt City. The Deals app, accessible through a bookmark in the right sidebar, currently shows between four and 13 available Deals in each city.

Rather than Liking a Page, Facebook’s standard update subscription mechanism, signing up for Deals means users are informed of new offers directly via the news feed and email, as well as through Facebook notifications. This gives Facebook the power to freely manipulate how prominent stories about Deals are in the news feed. However, so far, Facebook has not oversaturated the feed with with Deals announcements that could increase traction but also might detract from the social content, opting to promote through home page ads and emails instead.

The purchase of a Deal triggers a news feed story in the feeds of friends. While other pre-paid coupon services have to ask users to share news of their purchase with their social media contacts, Facebook does this automatically. This purchase virality could drive the success of Deals if it can gain initial traction.

So far though, our San Francisco-based team has hardly seen or heard of any people purchasing Deals. My Deals app’s “Deals Friends Like or Have Bought” section only could only tell me about two friends Liking the businesses offering Deals. Low traction in San Francisco, thought of as one of Facebook’s strongholds, suggests traction is probably low in other cities as well.

A core deficiency in the product that may be hampering traction is the generally low value of the Deals. Several offer discounts of as little as 20% off such as $40 for $50 worth of kayak rentals. Deeper discounts are often relegated to experiences that appeal to a small audience. With Facebook trying to create a groundswell of buzz for Deals, it may need to sidestep its provider partners and subsidize businesses to offer Deals that appeal to a wide audience with discounts worth telling one’s friends about.

Facebook’s official statement on the peformance of the Deals test to date is “the early feedback from businesses has been positive, and they have been able to find new customers to bring into their stores.  Facebook has seen that people are finding a lot of Deals through their friends and that Deals found through friends have higher conversion rates for businesses. We’re also seeing an increase in fans of a business after the Deal has run.” Notice that nothing is said about how many Deals are being purchased.

Five New Cities, Flashier Presentation

Still, Facebook tells us it is planning to expand the Deals program to Seattle, Denver, Charlotte, St. Louis and Minneapolis. Meanwhile, Google has launched its own Offers product in Portland, New York City, and the Bay Area, and plans to expand it to Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Both are racing to lock down a presentation and distribution strategy that can attain a high conversion rate.

As part of these these trials, Facebook is testing a more stylized, graphic-oriente, and detailed presentation format for its Deals app. This format, which can be seen when browsing Deals in San Francisco, contrasts with the original Deals app design that showed small panels with tiny pictures and nothing but the headline and price.

The new format is much more compelling allowing users to immediately see what’s included in a Deal, when it expires, and if friends have Liked it without clicking through to view it’s full description. The ability to see a social recommendation from a trusted source for a Deal should increase the click through rate and bring more users in range of actually purchasing a Deal.

Facebook knows it hasn’t found the optimal design for the Deals product, and therefore has been wise not to promote it too aggressively. With time, it may be able to find a style that properly marries high value discounts with the social nature of the site. If Facebook can improve the value and presentation of its Deals, it’s not difficult to imagine friends discovering and purchasing them, inviting friends to buy them too, and planning a group outing to redeem them all within a news feed conversation.

There was an interesting mix of applications on our list of the the fastest growing on the Facebook platform this week by monthly active users. They included professional networking, Google+, Hulu, dating, videos, profile badges and MySpace’s music app.

The apps on our list grew from between 118,200 and 322,700 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. All in all, it was a pretty typical week for the emerging category, which we define as apps that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	المزرعة	323,485	+322,653	+38,780%
2.	Animal Party	854,405	+261,471	+44%
3.	BeKnown	509,334	+210,072	+70%
4.	Direct Access	279,889	+210,064	+301%
5.	1 vs 100	234,308	+197,276	+533%
6.	Hulu	477,171	+194,398	+69%
7.	Seçim Anketi	540,359	+177,176	+49%
8.	Deal or No Deal	392,049	+176,045	+82%
9.	Millionaire Boss	285,505	+163,501	+134%
10.	Video Land	229,535	+158,164	+222%
11.	แฮปปี้เบบี้	956,055	+146,760	+18%
12.	BILD Profil-Badges	156,416	+140,966	+912%
13.	Myspace Music App	868,988	+126,075	+17%
14.	Perfect Getaway	857,160	+125,585	+17%
15.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	540,241	+125,385	+30%
16.	Total Domination: Nuclear Strategy	444,396	+123,790	+39%
17.	المزرعة السعيدة	751,522	+122,819	+20%
18.	100YearsWar Philippines: An UNREAL 3D MMORPG ★★★★★	311,893	+119,401	+62%
19.	Super Mario 3	693,689	+119,164	+21%
20.	JackpotJoy Slots	270,568	+118,210	+78%

BeKnown was at the top of our list with 210,100 MAU. Then Direct Access followed with 279,900 MAU; this app doesn’t appear to be an official Google+ app but asks users to add their friends to this new social network via Facebook.

Hulu was next on the list with 194,400 MAU. Hulu seems to be giving Facebook integration another try with its current Connect push. Then Turkish dating app Seçim Anketi added 177,200 MAU. Video Land, a video app, added 158,200 MAU.

The German BILD Profil-Badges grew by about 141,000 MAU this week and the Myspace Music App grew by 126,100 MAU. This app claims to be a “light” version of the MySpace artist profile enabling users to share content on both networks at the same time. The rest of the list was composed of games.

Today, Facebook announced the release of the new OAuth2.0-ready version of its JavaScript SDK. This will allow developers to create applications that securely pass User IDs and access tokens. Facebook has pushed back the deadline by which all developers must use the OAuth 2.0 standard from September 1st to October 1st. Facebook has also made some changes to the Developer app to support the migration.

The new JavaScript SDK should become available on Github tomorrow, at which point Facebook will update its reference documentation. Facebook is currently rolling out support for JavaScript OAuth 2.0 across its servers, and those that try upgrading before the roll out finishes may encounter errors.

Facebook experienced some security issues and public scrutiny when it was discovered that some iframe applications were leaking access tokens to unauthorized parties including advertisers. These access tokens could be used to perform actions or extract data from a user’s account without their consent.

While the actual risk to users was low, Facebook accelerated its roadmap for implementing the OAuth 2.0 standard in order to prevent this type of data leak. Facebook planned to have new versions of both the PHP and JavaScript SDKs available by July 1st, with completion of the migration to the security standard planned for July 1st. The PHP SDK was released early, but technical issues delayed the JS SDK’s release until today, prompting the deadline extension.

OAuth 2.0 support is opt-in to prevent breakage to apps before developers complete the transition. To enable it, Facebook explains that developers can include the an oauth parameter to FB.init and set it to true as in this example:

FB.init({
   appId : YOUR_APP_ID,
   // other parameters,
   oauth : true
});

Setting the parameter to false or omitting it will keep OAuth 2.0 disabled. For more details on how development differs between the old and new JavaScript SDK, see the release announcement blog post.

Facebook has made some modifications to the Developer app. The “OAuth 2.0 for Canvas setting” has been renamed “signed_request for Canvas” to clarify that when enabled, developers will received a signed_request parameter. An OAuth Migration setting has been added that when enabled indicates the developer has completed the migration to access tokens. Both setting default to disabled.

The Facebook Developer Roadmap now shows that by October 1st, all apps must use OAuth 2.0, expect encrypted access tokens, process signed_request, and have obtained an SSL certificate to allow HTTPS browsing. Once the JavaScript SDK is available, all developers should prepare for this deadline so they have plenty of time to work out bugs.

Facebook desktop and web client developer Wowd has shut down after failing to gain traction, AllThingsD reports. Facebook has hired seven of its former engineers, while several other engineers and Wowd’s founder will form mobile startup called Jildy. Facebook and Jildy have both also licensed several Wowd patents, including ones for social search page ranking and a distributed file system that were bought at the last minute by an unnamed publicly traded company that will honor the deals.

We covered the launch of Wowd’s desktop client back in August 2010. The product sought to allows to create custom news feeds based search parameters or characteristics such as “infrequent posters”. It also looked to offer a way to hide game spam, or view all game-related posts in one feed.

However, the relatively inaccessible nature of desktop software, the launch of social browser RockMelt, improved feed filtering options on Facebook.com, and a significant change to the news feed that kept game spam out of the feeds of non-gamers prevented Wowd from gaining traction. Four months later when it launched a web version, the desktop software had only racked up 500,000 total users and 70,000 daily active users, indicating there wasn’t a massive demand for its Facebook client.

AllThingsD has also gotten the details on what’s happening now. Wowd’s products are no longer available and the company has shut down, bringing the $5 million it raised from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, KPG Ventures and Stanford University with it. And, CEO Mark Drummond says that by the end it only had “a few million users” and “we weren’t growing fast enough.”

Seven of its Serbian engineers will be moving to California to join Facebook, however, the report says. There they might apply their knowledge of content filtering to improve Facebook’s news feed algorithm EdgeRank, or the page ranking of its internal search engine. Drummond and five other Wowd engineers will go on to build Jildy, a mobile app that filters social data.

Wowd applied for several fast track patents in October that were issued on May 11th. It agreed to license these to Facebook and Jildy. When a unnamed company heard this news it purchased the patents from Wowd, but the licensing deals will go on.

One social search patent analyzes a user’s identity and filter results based on what similar users clicked. Facebook could use this to improve relevance of its internal search results. For instance, a search for a specific location of a national chain of restaurants could rank highest the Facebook Page most often clicked by others from the same city. Similar filtering could be done by age, spoken language, or education history.

The other patent for a distributed file system that can communicate between instances of desktop software fast enough to permit real-time searches. Facebook could use this technology to link instances of software being designed by its Seattle-based desktop software team. It could also prevent scaling issues in the even of data center failures.

Though 15 other Wowd engineers are now out of a job, the outcome of the company’s demise is relatively positive. Nearly half the company already have new jobs, some at Facebook, and the patent licenses should earn some money for Wowd’s former team. Facebook will benefit from this new talent and technology, and RockMelt is now left as the only serious Facebook desktop client.

Facebook yesterday announced that when users post a URL in a comment, a preview of content from that page will be shown in-line. Similar to when users post URLs into the Facebook publisher for sharing to the news feed, comment reels can now show photos, play videos, and display blurbs and images from websites. Unlike wall and news feed posts, the content preview won’t appear until after the URL is published, but comment authors are then given the option to remove the preview.

The ability to show content previews of URLs in comments should make comment reels more engaging, keep users from having to click links blindly, and allow them to compellingly reference off-site content in conversations. It should increase referral traffic driven to third-party site by Facebook.

Facebook has been adding new functionality to comments over the past few months. In March users gained the ability to tag comments with friends as well as Pages, Groups, Events, and apps they’re connected to. In April, it began allowing users to edit comments they’ve posted if they click the ‘x’ on a comment within a few seconds of posting it.

Previously, if users wanted to share a URL in a comment, the link would appear as simple text. Without some kind of image to attract eye balls, these links weren’t clicked as often as the quality of their content warranted. It also meant other users couldn’t tell where the link led by for clicking it, decreasing trust and increasing worry about being scammed such that users might not click through.

A Wide Variety of Rich Content

Now if a user posts a URL into a comment field and publishes, a preview of the URL’s content will appear in-line. The author can then click “Remove preview” if they wish to strip the rich content from the comment. Unfortunately, because the preview doesn’t appear while users are still composing their comment, they can’t choose the delete the URL but keep the preview as they can with wall and news feed posts. This means that a redundant instance of the URL will appear in the comment’s text, making the accompanying commentary by the author more difficult to read.

Photos can be posted in comments by publishing a link leading directly to an image file. If users post the URL of a Facebook photo, the preview will include a link to the photo’s owner and the album it is in. Videos from a variety of sites, including YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, and Hulu can be played in-line within comments. Users can share music by posting links directly to MP3s or to streaming sites such as Soundcloud, Grooveshark, and BandCamp.

URLs of websites without rich content will generate a preview that includes a blurb and a thumbnail image if available. Websites can control which images and text are included by marking up their pages with Facebook’s Open Graph tags. Unlike wall and news feed posts, users can’t edit the text of a preview’s headline or blurb caption.

Comment previews should help users find more interesting off-site content to consumer and allow them to click links more confidently. The ability to compellingly reference a news story or video relevant to a discussion should increase engagement and lead to longer comment reel conversations.

Pages will be able to use the feature to respond to comments on their walls with rich content. They’ll also be able to post rich content to the comment reels of other Pages to attract visitors. For instance, if one Page posts a simple text status update, another Page might be able to steal its thunder by posting a video as comment on the post.

Designed to Prevent Spam

[Update: Originally, this article noted that the comment previews could be used for spam because spammers could post links with eye-grabbing previews as comments to Pages, which other users would have to see and might be lured into click. However, the designer of the feature, Facebook's Tom Whitnah, has informed us that comment previews were designed to prevent this kind of spam:

"When you're viewing a comment with a preview, it will be collapsed by default unless you are either friends with the commenter or the commenter is the author of the post. This means that when you're viewing public page posts, you'll have to click Expand Preview to actually see the preview for virtually all comments. So this means for compelling comments, people can still view the previews onsite, while spammy comment previews on pages are likely to never be seen/expanded. Therefore comments with previews should rarely be more compelling vectors for spam and won't be able to attract more attention to their comment with a salacious image."]

Overall, though, comment previews should enrich the user experience and increase the amount of referral traffic Facebook sends to third-party websites. Posts in comment reels send notifications to the original post’s author and other commenters. The rich content these notifications link to may inspire additional comments that in turn generate more notifications, causing comment previews to increase the frequency of return visits to the site.

The more referral traffic Facebook drives, the more that businesses and websites recognize Facebook’s influence. This leads them to devote more resources to optimizing their site through Open Graph tags, developing a presence through Facebook Pages, and buying Facebook ads.

Facebook added some varied posts to its Careers Page this week, and a handful of jobs on its LinkedIn feed. Some highlights include engineering positions, a data center job, some account management positions and a counsel position.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Managing Editor, Corporate Communications
• Software Engineer, IT Engineering
• Data Center Site Selection Manager
• Revenue Accountant – EMEA (Dublin)
• Manager, Audio/Visual Support
• CERT Engineer (Incident Response)
• Law Enforcement Response Analyst (contract)
• Policy and Operations Manager
• Account Manager – CEEMEA
• Client Partner – Italian (Dublin)
• Account Manager – Polish (Dublin)
• Account Manager – Czech (Dublin)
• Analyst, Online Sales Operations – French (Dublin)
• Analyst, Platform Operations – French & Spanish (Dublin)
• Analyst, User Operations – Contractor (Palo Alto)
• Engineering Manager, ERP
• Recruiting Coordinator – Contract (Dublin)
• Analyst, Product Analytics

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Revenue Accounting and Operations Manager, Facebook
• Commercial Counsel, Facebook
• Trust and Safety Manager, Facebook
• Policy and Operations Manager, Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Contractor (Palo Alto), Facebook

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Facebook continued hiring a bunch of interns this week, according to the company’s Careers Page and LinkedIn feed, but also hired Jennifer Yuille to work in consumer media, a few engineers, and based on listings removed from the Careers Page, positions in marketing, mobile, business ops and more were filled as well.

New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:

• Jennifer Yuille, Consumer Media – previously worked for Polyvore, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN.
• Omid Rouhani-Kalleh, Software Engineer – formerly worked as a Senior Research Engineer at Yahoo! Labs.
• Kingston Tam, Open Graph Intern.
• Wei Liao, Software Engineer Intern.
• Mircea Dima, Software Engineer Intern.
• Rachel Fong, Software Engineering Intern.
• Matt Dempsey, Product Design Intern.
• Sarah Katz, User Operations Analyst – formerly worked in admissions at Vanderbilt University Office.
• Po-chun Chang, Software Engineer – previously worked as a Senior Application Developer at Oracle.
• Kenneth Kirchhoff, Analyst – previously a FACT Contract Coordinator at Maersk Logistics.
• Mohammad Kotb, Software Engineer Intern.
• Bruno Rahle, Software Engineering Intern.

Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:

• Platform and Mobile Researcher
• Manager, Communications and Public Policy (Australia & New Zealand)
• Corporate Counsel
• Director, Business Operations (Global Direct Sales)
• Relationship Manager, Agency Relations – London, UK
• Manager, ERP
• Account Manager (Amsterdam)
• Client Partner – Slovak (Dublin)
• Analyst, Platform Operations – Spanish (Dublin)
• Manager, Merchant Services (Austin)
• Manager, Merchant Services (Palo Alto)
• Analyst, User Operations – Arabic (Dublin)
• Strategist, Market Solutions – Financial Services (New York)
• Marketing Communications Manager
• Software Engineer 1106004
• Web Application Engineer

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

The following is an excerpt. The complete article, available in our Facebook Marketing Bible, includes a full walk-through of how to send invites for friends to Like your Page using the “Invite Friends” tool Facebook launched this week, as well as additional strategies for maximizing the conversion rate of the invites you send.

To grow a Page, you need dedicated fans. These are the people that share your Page with friends, tag it in status updates, and take actions that seed Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad unit. Page administrators can convert their friends into dedicated fans using the “Invite Friends” tool which sends notifications to friends suggesting they Like a Page. This can help jumpstart growth for new Pages or facilitate further viral growth for established Pages.

Here we’ll walk through how the tool works, and provide strategies for attaining the highest conversion rate on your invites through timing, targeting clusters of friends, and more.

“Invite Friends” can be accessed from the right-hand Page admin menu that admins see when viewing their own Pages. It is the most direct and visible way Facebook has ever allowed Page invites to be sent. Therefore, we recommend using this tool now in case Facebook removes the feature or begins delivering the invites through a less visible channel.

Invite Friends Strategies

Timing

You want to send your invites at a time when friends are likely to be using the web version of Facebook. This is because users are more accustomed to browsing Pages from a full sized browser, and some native mobile apps do not support Page browsing or Liking.

Think about what time zone your invite recipients are in and send invites when they’re likely to be home, such as in the weekday evenings, rather than out using their mobile device, such as weekend evenings. This way when they first see the notification they’ll have the time and correct browser to check out your Page and Like it.

If several of a user’s friends Like a Page in a short period of time, they may see a “[friend name] and [x] other friends Like [your Page] story in the news feed. For instance, if within a few hours four of my friends Liked the Starbucks Page, I might see a news feed story that says “Eric Eldon and three more friends like Starbucks”, with the name of the Page linked.

These stories can expose a link to your Page to people you aren’t friends with via a compelling implicit social recommendation, helping you earn additional Likes from your invites.

The full version of this article, including a full walk-through of the tool and three more strategies for sending successful invites can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing, advertising, and ecommerce on Facebook.

Gekko is a new Facebook app that allows users to get travel recommendations from friends, but also pay for rooms and requests deals from hotels and restaurants. While there are already several travel apps and websites that let users ask for tips from their Facebook friends such as TripAdvisor and Gogobot, Gekko differentiates itself by aggregating hotel prices within the app rather than forcing users to check each travel booking site individually. While the concept of being able to request discounts and perks sounds good, it’s unclear whether businesses will actually take the time and have the savvy to grant them.

Gekko was developed by a 12-person team plus some outside developers. The London-based company has taken private investment from Holland’s Velocity Capital, which is also the primary investor in Gekko founder Dino van Es’ online stock brokerage firm Zecco. The company receives a revenue share from any bookings made through the app.

Once users have installed the app, they’re given options to ask friends for advice by posting to the Facebook news feed. They can invite friends to the app or follow other users so they can see their in-app activity on a Gekko news feed. Users can also build lists of their favorite places that can be shared with friends.

The interface is reasonably well-designed, but all of these features can found on other apps and sites where they’re more likely to have friends. What’s more interesting is what happens when users search for a hotel, city, or restaurant. Search results are filtered to promote places that friends have been to, favorited, or commented on.

While viewing a hotel users can set their stay dates and request prices. At this point, Trip Advisor and Gogobot open a cascade of individual windows displaying prices from each travel site users leave checked — not a good user experience. Gekko loads for a second before displaying a list of prices from each site. This makes it simple to find the lowest price and click through to pay.

If users don’t see a satisfactory price, or want to shoot for even cheaper they can click a “Request a deal” button”. Gekko then asks the venue if it would like to grant a discount, upgrade, complimentary drink or other perk. Users are notified in the app if their request has been approved.

Gekko CEO Michel Cassius told me there aren’t privacy concerns as businesses don’t know the identity of the user requesting a deal. I expressed skepticism about whether the deal inquiries would reach someone authorized to grant them, and whether businesses would take the time or be willing to respond. He said it’s “too early for us to say. Hotels have deals they offer to their registered users or through sites, and this is another channel for doing promotions.”

Cassius told me that the Gekko beta test saw high engagement and time spent in the app. Soon, the app will be available in Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and Portuguese. It is also seeking celebrity ambassador who can amass a following within the app and give special recommendations of destinations.

Though it is late comer to the space, the low-friction user experience and social nature of travel booking could help Gekko gain traction. Its long-term success will be influenced by the personalized deals feature. If users believe they can get exclusive perks by booking through Gekko rather than elsewhere, it could stand to monetize well through its revenue share arrangement.

Facebook is taking a social approach to getting local business owners to claim their Place, which is the first step to getting them to buy ads and improve the content on these Pages. Now when Facebook users visit local business Places pages that haven’t been claimed, they’ll see a link that asks “Do you know the owner?” They can then submit an email address or friend’s name, allowing Facebook to contact the owner and ask them to claim the Page.

When Facebook launched its Places location-based check-in service, it created Places pages for local businesses by pulling info from location database Localeze as well as allowing users to create Places for locations that didn’t have them. Business owners can claim their Places by submitting documentation proving ownership to Facebook. Claiming a Place allows an owner to moderate content posted to the Page’s wall, post updates to the news feed, run Check-in Deals to incentivize foot traffic, and purchase Facebook ads promoting their business.

However, to date, many Places are still unclaimed because Facebook didn’t have contact information for the owners or they didn’t respond to inquiries. To fix this, Facebook has released a feature that leverages an owner’s friends to get them to claim their businesses.

Unclaimed Places now display a “Do you know the owner?” link beneath their profile picture. Any user can click it to open a window asking “Do you think you know the owner or someone connected to this business?” A typeahead allows users to enter a friend’s name, or submit the email address if they aren’t friends with the owner or representative. Once submitted, Facebook thanks user for their help, and informs them that the person entered will receive a message explaining how they can claim their business.

Claimed Places Produce Advertising Revenue

Owners don’t need to wait for this message, though. All business owners should search Facebook for the name and address of their business to find any Places pages they’re the rightful owner of, and then begin the claims process by clicking the “Is this your business?” link beneath a Place’s profile picture. This will allow them to drive more foot traffic to their location.

Facebook has been making an effort to get rid of duplicate Places pages, but many still exist. It’s best for businesses to only have one Places page as it simplifies the check-in process for users, creates a central web presence, and makes it easier for friends to discover which friends are currently at the same location. Therefore, owners should claim the most popular Place for their business, and then report the rest as duplicates by using the “Repoort Page” option beneath the Place’s profile picture.

Finding admins for more Places pages is important to the success of Facebook Places for several reasons:

• Admins can post relevant content to their Place’s walls or the news feeds of those that Like it
• Admins can moderate the wall to remove spam or objectionable content
• Admins can drive engagement with the product by incentivizing check-ins with Check-In Deals

Most importantly for Facebook’s bottom line, though, is that owner’s who’ve claimed Places and become admins are the only ones who can by Facebook ads promoting the Page. A MerchantCircle survey of local businesses owners showed that while 66% of small businesses have used Facebook for marketing, only 22% have used Facebook ads. This means there is plenty of runway for Facebook to monetize local business owners.

By allowing users to instantly create a Places page from their phone for any location they want to check in to, Facebook has likely created millions of new Pages. If it can find people to claim these Places, it could significantly increase its local advertising revenues.

[Thanks to Kevin Evanetski for the tip]