Inside Facebook

Facebook has expanded its “Recommendations” feature on Places Pages to now show endorsements from non-friends. Previously users only saw “Recommendations from friends” in the right sidebar. The site is also testing a new way to get users to write recommendations for Pages that are shown in a Page’s sidebar and published to the news feed. A small percentage of users are seeing a prompt to “Help your friends discover great places to visit by writing a recommendation for [currently viewed Page]” when they click the Like button for that Page.

The display of recommendations by non-friends, and the tested prompt if rolled out, could generate more news feed distribution and social endorsements for Pages, convincing more users to Like them.

Early this summer, Facebook added the “Recommend This Place” module to the right sidebar of Facebook Places Pages. Users visiting a Places Page then began seeing “Recommendations from friends” in the right sidebar if any of their friends had filled out the module. These recommendations were also posted to the author’s wall and the news feeds of their friends, giving local businesses and other Pages listing a street address an opportunity to attract new fans and convert visitors.

While recommendations from friends are probably more convincing than those from strangers, Facebook seems to have determined that both are worthwhile additions to Places Pages. If one of a user’s friends has left a recommendation, they’ll see that in the sidebar, but if none have, users will see endorsements from non-friends. Since a Page’s wall or tab apps don’t always give a clear depiction of a Page’s purpose or value, the explicit approval of other users might persuade a Page visitor to click the Like button.

Via the newly tested prompt to add a recommendation, this Like could start a chain of endorsement. The prompt is a significant increase in prominence for the recommendation feature, popping up in the center of the screen when a user clicks the Like button atop a Places Page. This is much more noticeable than the feature’s previous location in the sidebar, and will likely lead to a higher rate of completion of recommendations, benefiting Places Page owners in turn.

Facebook has made several moves as of late to assist local businesses. Its launched new free growth channels for their Pages such as the recommendations feature, pushed to get more business owners to claim their Places Pages, and added new ad targeting options to help them reach nearby potential customers. These efforts may be designed to entice local businesses to make Facebook a more central component of their marketing mix and buy more ads on the site.

[Thanks to David Hutnik for the tip]

Local business owners can find more strategies for gaining Likes and walk-throughs of Facebook’s latest Pages features in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising on Facebook.

UK Won’t Ban Facebook – Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion met with United Kingdom officials Thursday regarding the social networks’ role in summer riots there. The government ended up not moving to restrict access to the social networks in emergencies such as riots.

Facebook Takes Third Spot for Video – Facebook becomes the third largest video site on the Internet, comScore reported. That is 51.5 million people who watched videos on the platform in July.

AT&T to Discontinue Facebook Phone – AT&T is reportedly set to drop its “Facebook phone” called the Status, according to TechCrunch.

Places More Popular Than Foursquare – London developer Golden Gekko reports its clients report much more Facebook check-ins than Foursquare in Europe. Magnus Jern reported that the ratio ranged from 5-10 to 1. However, the future of the service is unclear.

Facebook Hit 1 Trillion Pageviews - Facebook surpassed 1 trillion pageviews according to Google’s Ad Planner tool, although comScore says otherwise.

Facebook Mobile App to Offer Photo Filters - Facebook looks to be competing with Instagram’s classy mobile app by offering almost a dozen photo filters to its mobile own application — following Facebook’s attempt to buy the startup, according to The New York Times. News of the feature first leaked out in June.

Recapping Facebook’s Bug Bounty – Neal Poole did a basic rundown of Facebook’s Security Bug Bounty program, which included information about multi-line JavaScript URI, redirects preserving fragment portions of URLs, XSS filters and more.

Facebook Wraps Up Farm Bureau Dispute – Facebook and the Farm Bureau had a dispute over Facebook trademarking “FB,” but it seems like the lawsuit is set to be wrapped up.

Milyoni Chart for Credits – Milyoni created a nice chart and whitepaper that includes ways that Facebook Credits can, and cannot, be used.

Facebook to Open Second Campus - Facebook is set to open up an additional campus from its current Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. The second campus pwill be southwest of the current location, to be constructed in 2013 to accommodate about 2,800 employees.

Ticketmaster Allows Users to Find Friends – Line Nation’s Ticketmaster service launched an app that allows users to see where their friends are sitting on seat maps and tag themselves.

BBC Does Facebook On-Demand Video – BBC has developed an on-demand Facebook application allowing users to rent episodes from the show “Top Gear” for 48 hours.

ShopIgniter, Involver Partner – The two companies are entered into a partnership to help online retail businesses with a management content system.

Facebook will remove the Places check-in feed from its mobile apps and interface, a company spokesperson confirms with us. Rather than check-in, users will be able to add their city-level location or tag a specific Place in any post.

The change will come as part of the rollout of the new privacy and location sharing features announced today. Without the dedicated check-in feed, it may be more difficult for users to determine the current location of friends. However, Foursquare and other locations services built around a check-in feed should be pleased about the news of Facebook using location as a layer rather than as content itself.

Facebook launched Places a year ago, allowing users to check in to locations they were within three city blocks of and view a feed of check-ins of friends via m.facebook.com and the native smartphone apps. In April, Facebook added a map view to the iPhone app’s check-in feed to make it easier to tell if friends were nearby.

Some users, especially those in dense urban areas with lots of active Facebook friends, found these features very helpful for finding things to do in real-time. The check-in feed was never brought to the web interface, though, so users without smartphone access had to sift the location of friends out of the entire news feed.

Soon this may be the fate of smartphone users as well, as a Facebook spokesperson tells us “We’ve learned a lot since launching Places. The core insight is that most people on Facebook think about location as part of their everyday experience. The Places check in feed on the mobile app will go away and now a “place” becomes another descriptor to add to any post.”

When users post content from the web, mobile site, or smartphone apps, they’ll have the option to tag a Place, whether they’re there currently or just want to mention it. As TechCrunch illustrates, Facebook’s foot-traffic incentivizing Check-in Deals will still be available, with users seeing the option to redeem them appended to the news feed story of their mention of a location.

Unless Facebook adds a filter to the news feed that only shows posts tagged with specific locations, the change will likely make it harder to find exactly where friends are currently are and meet up with them. Even if Facebook did add a location filter, it wouldn’t be able to tell if a friend had tagged a Place because they were planning to go their in future, had been there in the past, just wanted to discuss it, or are actually there. This may also prevent Facebook from sending helpful push notifications about one’s closest friends checking in nearby.

This could drive users looking to keep track of the current locations of friends to Foursquare, Google Latitude, Gowalla, or other location services. While perhaps valuable to a smaller audience than location as a layer, these services will continue helping users find their friends in real-time.

Making location a component of status updates, photos, and other content will surely give users more context to what their friends are sharing. Those who currently enjoy checking in will probably just post status updates, tag their current location and friends who are with them, and add a description such as “Here at…”. It will also help users plan future meetups by allowing them to tag locations and say they’ll be there in an hour.

Still, it seems unnecessary to remove the check-in feed and the ability to populate that feed by explicitly informing Facebook of one’s current location. The mobile interfaces could keep the feed and use the existing check-in button to indicate real-time location rather than just a mention of a Place.

Instead, Facebook is removing functionality some have grown to enjoy, and ignoring the fact that sometimes location is valuable in its own right, not just as a layer.

Some Facebook Places Pages for local businesses and locations are now showing an “Around The Web” panel listing of links to corresponding venue pages of the sites of Facebook’s Places partners: Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, SCVNGR, and Booyah. These links could help businesses drive traffic and checkins to their other online presences.

Foursquare tells us its inclusion in Around The Web is not part of its official partnership with Facebook. Therefore the feature may simply be designed to provide useful information to Facebook users, rather than signaling a deepening of Facebook’s existing Places partnerships, or the fulfillment of terms of the original partnership announced a year ago.

Third-Party Location Service Links

Beneath the profile picture and navigation menu of some Places Pages that list a street address, such as San Francisco’s Bender’s Bar & Grill, there is a now an Around The Web panel. It displays links to any existing venue pages on other location services for the business or location represented by the Facebook Page.

If users click through their links, the third-party venue pages may show them public tips and photos, as well as if any Facebook friends have checked in there if the user has their Facebook account connected to the the site. Facebook Places Pages typically only show checkins, photos and other content from a user’s friends. The public data from these third-party sites could help users get a more accurate feel for a location, especially if they don’t have any friends who’ve checked in to the location before.

Around The Web will remind users to check in to the location on the service of their choice next time they’re nearby. The links may also help businesses attain more redemptions of deals they run to incentivize checkins on these third-party services.

Not Part of Official Partnerships

We’ve reached out to Facebook several times over the last week regarding how admins can add the Around The Web panel to their Pages, but haven’t received a response. The Pages we’ve seen with “Around The Web” have all been unclaimed Places. Our test of adding a third-party venue page to the website field of a claimed Facebook Places Page did not cause the panel to appear. Facebook may only testing the feature with a small number of certain types of Pages, but may choose to roll it out further in the future.

When Facebook launched Places last August it announced partnerships with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and Booyah. Users of these partnered services can opt to syndicate their checkins to Facebook. The presence of partner logos and links to their sites on Facebook Pages is a bit of a surprise though, as Facebook rarely links offsite except as part of news feed stories about content contributed by third-parties.

Foursquare says its inclusion in the feature “isn’t part of a formal agreement between our companies,” but may use data from it’s Venues Project API that is designed to help share info about locations between different websites.

Facebook’s willingness to include links to other location services on Page may mean it doesn’t consider them a threat to Places. This contrasts with how it perceives Google+, considering Facebook recently forbid game developers from linking to Google’s new social network.

[Thanks to Eti Suruzon for the tip]

Facebook has made several improvements to ad targeting in its self-serve tool, including the ability for US advertisers to target specific zip codes through the self-serve tool, Ads Power Editor, and Ads API. Previously, advertisers could only geo-target ads to cities, states/provinces, and countries. This will be beneficial for small and local businesses who can now target potential customers within walking distance. The option could attract the long tail of small businesses to Facebook Ads, driving revenue growth.

Several other targeting options are also being tested, including suggestions of broad category targets based on selected precise interest keyword targets, and the ability to target a previously used strings of Liked Pages. These will make creating similar campaigns easier, and help advertisers expand their targeting to reach more users who will find their ads relevant.

Driving Local Advertising Revenue

Advertising is Facebook’s main revenue source. Early on in 2009, reports indicated that local advertising made up the majority of Facebook’s ad revenue. However, the launch of the Ads API later that year, and its recent official public launch, made it much easier for big brands to run larger and more sophisticated advertising campaigns. Nevertheless, city targeting has still been an invaluable tool for restaurants, night life establishments, retail, and professionals.

Local businesses owners don’t usually spend enough to be eligible for Facebook Ads API managed spend services. This forces them to use the self-serve tool, but some don’t have the expertise or resources necessary to develop social ad campaign strategies, test creative variants and targeting options, and understand analytics on the relatively young advertising channel. A June MerchantCircle report showed that 94% of local businesses are aware of Facebook Ads, though only 22% use them.

This indicates that Facebook has a lot of runway to increase local advertising spend if it can improve the self-serve tool with targeting options that appeal to small businesses, and educate them on how to use these options. With the addition of zip code targeting, local advertisers have more reason than ever to spend on Facebook.

Over the past few months Facebook has been showing sidebar modules asking users to confirm which of several zip codes they are closest to or live within. These may have been designed to establish a zip code for users that don’t list one so they could be accurately targeted by the new Facebook Ads feature.

Using Zip Code Targeting

A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed with us that “zip code targeting is now available in the US for advertisers through the Power Editor and the Ads Manager”. When advertisers create a Facebook ad campaign, they’ll see the zip code option under location targeting. They can then enter one or more zip codes to target users who live in any of those areas.

Zip code targeting will make Facebook Ads more useful to many verticals, including local politicians as Politico points out. Businesses with multiple franchises in a single city could advertise for specific branches. Businesses that have many competitors in big cities in which customers choose where to go based on what’s closest could use the tool to make sure those nearby know about them. It could also help event promoters increase attendance by drawing those that only have to travel a short distance.

Facebook should consider promoting the new targeting option with Page posts and perhaps even ads on other sites to raise awareness amongst local businesses. It should combine this outreach with education that increases the likelihood of new advertisers running a successful first campaign. This could lead local advertisers to stick with Facebook Ads and boost the site’s revenue for years to come.

For Facebook advertising strategies that can help you grow your Page, drive sales, and push traffic to your website, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

[Thanks to Amit Lavi for the tip]

In mid-July, Facebook confirmed to us that it began testing a new Parent-Child Page management system for business with a corporate / local structure — those with a central brand Page as well as Pages for each individual branch or franchise. The limited private beta program’s first public facing component is now live, with Regal Entertainment Group movie theaters now showing a new Facebook-developed Page tab app called Locations.

The new app allows parent corporations Pages to display a map of nearby branch locations and links to their individual Pages. The app should help corporate Pages drive more Likes and foot traffic to their local branches, and could replace the “store finder” tab app found on most corporate websites.

Prior to the the start of the Parent-Child Page management system, it was very difficult for corporations to manage a hierarchy of Pages. A single person had to be added as the admin of every Page, and multiple Pages could be posted to, have apps installed, or have settings changed simultaneously. It was therefore very difficult to coordinate large scale cross-Page marketing campaigns, such as offering a coupon on the Facebook Page of every McDonald’s restaurant.

First, a third-party tool called Hearsay Social launched to address the corporate / local problem. Over the last few months, though, that company worked with Facebook to create a native Parent-Child Page management system, complete with APIs and a basic graphic user interface. Now the initial tests of the system by a select few corporations are launching for public use.

The Regal Entertainment Group Page now uses the Locations tab to show a map of all its movie theaters and links to their Pages. The map, powered by Bing, defaults to a tight radius around your current coordinates, but lets users search any address to pull up nearby locations represented by child Pages and the faces of friends who’ve checked in there. These child Pages now feature a link back to the parent Page, facilitating cross-Page promotion.

The Locations app also turns corporate Pages into a portal for local branches. Users can simply visit the corporate Page to find links to a nearby instance of the business or organization, rather than leaving Facebook to use a store finder on a client’s website. Once access to the Parent-Child system and Locations is rolled out, it could significantly increase Facebook’s utility as a sort of Yellow Pages with social recommendations.

[Thanks to Kevin Evanetski for the tip]

Roost, developer of a social publishing platform, today launched a new tool for local businesses on Facebook that helps them determine what percentage of their fans actually live close enough to be customers. Roost Local Scorecard breaks down where a Page’s fans list as their current city, and provides tips for gaining more local fans and engaging them.

By using Roost Local Scorecard, Page admins can determine how to revise their publishing and advertising strategies to maximize the positive impact of Facebook on their business.

San Francisco-based Roost develops free Facebook and Twitter publishing tools for professionals, small businesses, and consultants and agencies, as well as a premium tool for real estate agents. Businesses submit their zip code and industry, and Roost provides recommendations of relevant content to post from local and popular news news outlets.

The free Local Scorecard app, built on Facebook Connect, is designed to bring in new customers for Roost by alerting businesses to their publishing needs. Users grant the app extended permissions and it analyzes one or more of their Pages. The app then displays which cities and countries their fans are from, gives them a score for how local their fan base is, and provides recommendations for how to gain more local fans.

If businesses see that a high percentage of their fans are not local, they should consider changing how they market themselves. In terms of advertising, they should make sure they’re geotargeting non-fans that live nearby. They should also be sure to refine their targeting to local when advertising to existing fans to make sure they’re not promoting sales or events at their location that distant fans can’t take advantage of.

When publishing updates to Facebook, a Page with a low local fan percentage should concentrate on promotions that encourage existing local fans to invite their friends to Like the Page. This can include campaigns that drive towards a Like count milestone, such as “Help us get to 100,000 fans”, or coupons that fans will want to share with friends.

The local fan base percentage can indicate how a business should be using the untargeted publishing feature on Facebook. A low local percentage means Pages should publish links and other content to all their fans that can leverage distant customers, such as links to their web store.

While relatively simple and clearly intended to drive leads for its own business, Roost’s Local Scorecard can reveal important information to local business owners. It’s important to keep gaining more Likes, but these are only valuable if local businesses know where they’re coming from and how to engage them to drive a return on their social media investment.

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]

Documents detailing an upcoming change to Facebook Pages and Places have been found by our German sister site, AllFacebook.de . We’ve now confirmed with Facebook that this week it will launch a limited private test of tools permitting a new parent-child management structure for Places that will allow corporations to administrate all the Places pages of the local instances of their business. On corporate parent Pages, an in-house “Locations” app will automatically display nearby branches and allow users to search for local branches by zip code, and child Places will feature a link back to their corporate Page.

Giants from foodservice, retail, insurance and other industries are already setting up Places for each of their branches to facilitiate local marketing and encourage checkins using the clumsier old system. Facebook’s new parent-child structure will make this process simpler and more systematized, which could lead more corporations to buy Facebook ads for their local branches.

Facebook tells us “We’re testing new ways for businesses with more than one location to develop a localized presence on Facebook. The tools launching this week…make it easier for businesses to begin to localize their voice at scale.”

The way Facebook’s location-based service originally worked made it difficult for corporations that needed to set up multiple Places, whether in the dozens or the thousands. Places, separate from Pages, had to be set up or claimed and then clumsily merged with Pages. Facebook has since streamlined this process, giving checkin functionality to any Page that lists a street address.

A corporation’s Page and all its local branch Places still couldn’t be connected on the backend of Facebook’s admin system, though. This meant that if a corporation wanted to push a branding or slogan change to all its Pages, or manage regulatory compliance, a single corporate representative had to be individually granted admin privileges to every Place.  Even then, changes had to be pushed one Page at a time.

Third-party Page management products such as Hearsay Social launched to specifically handle the corporate-local problem. This seemed like a lucrative business as corporations such as State Farm and 24 Hour Fitness were spending a lot on Facebook marketing, and the solution seemed more complicated than something Facebook would design a native product for. However, close relationships that Facebook has forged with corporations through its inside ad sales teams have now led it to address the corporate-local Page management issue.

Parent-Child Admin System and Pages API Changes

Facebook will offer a parent-child Page set up tool to a limited set of businesses that have a corporate-local structure.  Once the connections between parent and child Pages are arranged, parent Pages will include a Locations tab in their Edit Page admin interface navigation menu.

The Locations admin interface will display a list of all children Places, including the store ID, address, Like count, and checkin count of each. This will make it simple for a corporation to monitor the performance of its child Places. Admins will be able to search for a specific child Place by store ID, and make the Locations Page tab application visible to users or hide it.

When using Facebook as the parent Page, admins will have full admin control over the children Places, meaning they can go in and edit a Place page’s info, post or moderate content, change settings, and install tab applications. This means corporations will be able to swiftly address threats to their branding by deleting the posts of local branch admins or fans, as well as coordinate marketing campaigns such as the installation of a new sweepstakes app. Child Place admins won’t be able to remove admin privileges from parent admins.

It appears that Facebook will also support the parent-child structure in the Pages API. Settings, apps, and content moderation will be able to be controlled programmatically, enabling corporations to push changes to many Pages at once. For example, McDonalds could use the parent-child Page API to install an application and publish an update promoting it on all of its local Places simultaneously. Corporations will also be able to use a Checkin Deals API to offer rewards to users for visiting any of their local branches in person.

The corporate-local Pages API could encourage more developers to build apps designed for tighter integration between different levels of a company. For instance, developers could build contest apps that include local run-offs on child Places leading to worldwide finals that are held on a parent Page.

With time, Facebook may build more corporate-local moderation and publishing features into the graphic user interface so corporations can easily change the wall settings, ban certain words, or post content across all their Pages without the use of any code. This could commodify some third-party Page management services, forcing companies offering these services to look for other ways to provide value to their clients.

Locations In-House Page Tab Application

Facebook users visiting a parent Page will see a Locations tab app in the Page’s navigation menu. Parent pages will display a store locator that automatically shows a store nearby the user and can be used to search for branches by zip code. A map and list will show users nearby branches of a business along with thumbnail pictures of friends who’ve checked in there, and allow them to visit the corresponding children Places. These features will help users discover the local branches of their favorite corporations. This will in turn help drive foot traffic, and engagement with location-based Checkin Deals.

Children Places will display a link to their parent Page just below their name, allowing corporations to gain Likes from supporters of their local branches. Checkin counts from child Pages will be summed on the Parent page to give a more accurate impression of the global popularity of the business.

Overall, the parent-child structure and Locations app seem like a strong start to accommodating businesses and organizations with a corporate-local structure. These include some of the world’s biggest brands who are also the world’s biggest spending advertisers. If Facebook can get more corporations with local branches onto the Platform and using the parent-child Page system, it could lead to the launch of a huge number of new, well-funded local Places that it could offer its advertising services to.

Update 7/12/11 10:15am PST: Facebook has confirmed with us that the parent-child Page management set up tool will launch in limited private test this week.

Strategies for using Facebook Places to market your business can found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

Facebook is currently testing three new features designed to allow users to help the site improve the location database that powers its checkin service Places.

The Places Editor app allows users to add missing information to Places, as well as flag duplicate Places that are sometimes added by other locations services including Foursquare and Gowalla. The Favorite Places sidebar module lets users vote which of two Places they prefer, and the Add Category link on news feed checkin stories lets users tag Places with their type.

We believe Facebook is using the data to surface higher quality Places when users checkin and search the site, keep the database tidy so that different users check in to the same Place when they’re actually at the same location, and to improve ad relevance.

Facebook launched its checkin service Places in August, using Localeze to initially populate its location database. However, after nine months of use, the Places database has become a bit of a mess.

Places and Localeze are not synced, so the Places database does not always accurately reflect new or changed location, or contain pertinent data like a location’s website or category. Users sometimes add duplicate Places instead of checking in to official existing ones. Slightly different duplicate versions of Places are also sometimes added when users of third-party location services such as Foursquare and Gowalla publish their checkins to Places.

The result is that when users go to check in from their mobile device, they have to choose between a set of duplicates. For example, trying to check in to popular San Francisco hang out Dolores Park returns over a dozen duplicate Places. This splinters the checkins of users who are actually in the same location across multiple Places, reducing the value of the Here Now feature that shows friends and other users who are checked in to the same Place. It also prevents Facebook from displaying aggregated checkin news feed stories that inform users when multiple groups of friends are at the same Place, or from returning accurate search results.

Therefore, for Facebook Places to be as useful as possible, Facebook needed a way improve the metadata and remove duplicate Places for locations around the world. Its answer appears to be crowdsourcing. Its first data cleanup features were Suggest Edits, shown on all Places pages, and the Community Edits tab application, shown on the Places of cities. Now, Facebook is pushing users to improve its data through a canvas app, sidebar modules, and the news feed.

Places Editor

Some users are now seeing a Places Editor bookmark in their right sidebar navigation menu. The bookmark opens a canvas application that explains:

Welcome to the Places Editor. You’ve been either chosen by your hard work of helping Places or you’ve been invited by a friend who has helped many Places.

Places Editor lets you make sure the information about your favorite spots is complete and accurate. See two pages for the same restaurant? Notice a miscategorized shop? Let us know.

Users can then select to work on adding info or removing duplicates of popular Places in their country, local Places, or Places they and their friends have checked in to. If users are in the Missing Information tab, they fill empty fields such as category and phone number, similar to Community Edits. More comprehensive information on Places will allow Facebook to stand in for a phone book or a Google search for an address, and categories in particular can assist with ad targeting.

If users are in the Duplicate Places tab, they’re shown the official or most popular instance of a Place, and asked to mark whether similarly named Places are duplicates. Sometimes these duplicates are listed as being sourced from Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR or other location services. This is because checkin published to Facebook from one of these services via the API aren’t rolled in to the main Place for a location. Scrubbing Places of these duplicates will reduce confusion about which version of a Place to check in to.

Favorite Places

While browsing the site, some users are seeing a module in the right sidebar called Favorite Places. It presents users with two Places, typically of the same category, such as bars, or restaurants. Users are asked “Which Place do you like better?” and can hover over one to view a “Vote for this” button. Voting simply brings up another set of choices, with no clear indication of what users are accomplishing. This feature may need better messaging or positive reinforcement if Facebook wants users to vote.

Users can click a “See Your Favorites” link in the module to see a ranked list of all the Places they voted for. Facebook may use the preference data it collects from Favorite Places to to show users the Places they prefer first when they’re deciding where to check in.

In this way it can make up for the inaccuracy of GPS and decrease the likelihood that users will have to scroll through many Places to find the one they’re at. It could also add the preference signal to its internal search algorithm so a search of a category returns a user’s favorite matching locations.

Add Category

When users viewing their news feed see checkins of friends to Places that are uncategorized, they’ll see an “Add Category” action link beside the options to Like or comment. The link opens a pop up where users can submit category tags, or click through to edit the Place through the Suggest Edits feature.

When users add Places from their mobile device, they can add a name and description, but not a category. By adding categories to these Places, Facebook can properly group them in the Favorite Places module, and more accurately target ads to the users who Like those Places.

With Foursquare recently taking $50 million in funding, and other competitors like Google continuing to develop rival products, Facebook needs to keep the Places user experience as streamlined as possible. A major barrier to checking in on any location service is how long it takes. By improving the relevance of the nearby Places suggestions by combining preference and GPS, Facebook can make checking in less of a chore, and rack up more location data it can use to target ads.

To learn how your business can benefit from Facebook Places, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

[Thanks to Kevin from Social Yeah for the tips]