Facebook is testing a recommendation tab for some pages on its mobile touch site. As the company continues to build out its mobile pages with social recommendations and additional information, it could become an alternative to Yelp and other location-based search and review products.

In May, users gained the option to read and write recommendations for locations and any page with an address listed on Facebook. Bringing the feature to mobile devices has been an obvious next step so users can learn what their friends and others think of places nearby.

For now, users can access recommendations from m.facebook.com on touch devices, not the native apps. Users can search for a page by name or browse “Nearby.” At the top of the mobile page is a “More” option, which includes “Recommendation” in a drop-down menu. From there, users can write a recommendation (and adjust their privacy settings for the post) or read reviews from friends and the general public. As on the web, the default view is recommendations from friends.

Recommendations are only enabled for pages that are associated with a location. Any fan page can gain this status by adding an address to its info section, though it is likely Facebook will one day expand recommendations to all pages, including consumer goods, websites and other services.

When recommendations become available in Facebook’s mobile apps, stores and restaurants may start including “Recommend us on Facebook” calls to action at their locations, just as they encourage visitors to review them on Yelp. When users write on a page wall, that post can get quickly buried by more recent posts. Recommendations, however, are displayed separately and can be highly influential to a person’s friends and other users. They also generate a News Feed story which includes a link for a person’s friends to also write a recommendation.

Los Angeles International Airport was the most popular airport people checked into between August and November, according to information Facebook released today.

Based on check-ins on Facebook and third-party location services that have integrated with the Facebook Places API, airports in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas round out the Top 5. Twenty of Facebook’s 25 “most social airports” are located in the U.S. This could be useful for marketers considering check-in promotions or other Facebook campaigns, whether for travel companies or simply at airports. The thrill of travel combined with long wait times make airports ripe for Facebook activity.

Facebook also found an increase in check-ins during the holiday travel rush. Last year, check-ins were 20 times above average on Dec. 18, with highs also occurring on Dec. 23 and Dec. 24. Airport check-ins slowed after Christmas and increased again on Dec. 29 through Dec. 31 as people returned home or traveled for New Year’s Eve.

Below is Facebook’s list of Top 25 airports people checked into between August and November. We linked to the corresponding Facebook place pages that had the most check-ins. It is interesting to note that not all airports have claimed their automatically-generated place pages. These pages sometimes have more activity than the official fan pages operated by the airport.

For example, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport actively manages a page here, making posts and answering questions, but the Facebook-generated place page linked to below has nearly twice as many Likes and about 40 times as many check-ins. Embracing its new title as “most social airport,” LAX has already shared the news with fans of the place page it has claimed and customized with FBML and iFrame tabs.

1. Los Angeles International Airport
2. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
3. Chicago O’Hare International Airport
4. San Francisco International Airport
5. Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport
6. Denver International Airport
7. Sydney (Kingsford Smith) Airport
8. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport
9. McCarran International Airport
10. Suvarnabhumi International Airport
11. Philadelphia International Airport
12. Miami International Airport
13. Boston Logan International Airport
14. Charlotte Douglas International Airport
15. John F. Kennedy International Airport
16. Amsterdam Airport Schiphol
17. San Diego International Airport
18. Newark Liberty International Airport
19. Washington Dulles International Airport
20. Heathrow Airport
21. Toronto Pearson International Airport
22. Baltimore Washington International Airport
23. Portland International Airport
24. Fort Lauderdale – Hollywood International Airport
25. Salt Lake City International Airport

Facebook is prompting some users to tag the location of their past photo albums.

A module on the top left of some Facebook pages offers a suggested place page based on the plain text location included in an album’s description, asking “Was this taken at [location]?” If a user clicks “Yes,” the album’s location will link to the appropriate place page and the album will appear on the Map feature of the new Timeline.

This action builds more links between users’ online activity and offline whereabouts, which could have implications for ads and other Facebook services. The change also helps venues or businesses whose pages could see more activity as a result of being tagged.

Although Facebook discontinued Places as a singular product on the platform, the company has since integrated location into several features. In August, Facebook introduced the option to tag photos, status updates and Wall posts with location. At F8, Facebook previewed a map section as part of the new Timeline profile.

By encouraging users to include location with the content they add and have added in the past, Facebook can create richer profiles of its users. This location data could be applied to influence Edge Rank and ad targeting.

Facebook today announced the launch of a new translation tool powered by Microsoft Bing Translate that lets users select to view Page posts in their native language. Page admins can select to show only machine translated posts, or they can select to allow Facebook users to submit their own translations. If these community translations receive approvals from other users, they’ll replace the machine translation. Currently, all Pages have been automatically opted in to allowing both machine and community translations.

Many brands are building international fan bases for their Page, so the option to have their posts translated means they’ll be able to better engage these foreign audiences, driving more engagement and clicks to their content. While not always perfectly accurate, the free translation tool is much cheaper and faster than having a human translate, geo-target, and publish localized versions of their posts.

Currently, the Translate button only appears to users with their language set to Korean, Japanese, Russian, Taiwanese and Chinese-Hong Kong. If Facebook and Bing roll the feature out to other popular languages or allowed it to be applied to ads as well, it could become an important driver of international growth and business for all Pages. One day Bing translation could also be applied to user posts to allow people to communicate across language barriers and form more international friendships.

The launch of this feature follows tests of a machine translation option for user comments on Page posts that we spotted last month. While comment translation is not part of the Bing tool’s rollout, it shows the potential for user content to receive translation in addition to Page posts.

In the past, Facebook has worked with Microsoft to power its own internal search and to augment Bing.com search results with Like counts from a user’s friends and the Facebook population at large. More recently, Bing Maps was integrated into the new Timeline profile as well as Facebook Places. Facebook has been successful with translation in the past, originally crowdsourcing translation of the site’s interface in many languages, and later extending the crowdsourced translation tool to Facebook apps and Connect-integrated sites.

All Pages Have Been Opted In to Translation

To configure the Bing translation tool, admins can go to the Edit Page interface and select the Your Settings tab. They’ll then see a Translations From section where they can enable translations by machine; machine and community; machine, community, and admin, or they can disable the feature.

By default, Pages are set to allow machine and community translation. In most cases, admins will at least want to allow machine translations. Community translations may be more accurate, but admins will have to remember to moderate the translation submissions.

Once enabled, users with their Facebook language set to one of the feature’s current language will see a “Translate” button besides the Like, Comment, and Share buttons beneath that Page’s posts. When clicked, the text of the Page’s post will change from the language it was originally written in to the user’s selected language.

According to the Help Center, Admins will also see a “Manage Translations” link underneath their Page posts. From here they can approve or delete community-submitted translations or add their own. If admins find someone trying to submit objectionable content or spam as a translation, they can quickly block them from their Page and from submitting translations to other Pages as well.

Facebook already offers geographic and language targeting in the Page post publisher. This allowed Pages to manually translate their updates and publish them to the corresponding segment of their fans. This was a lot of work, though, especially since there is no way to hide a post from certain countries or languages. Some third-party Facebook Page management tools offer translation services, but now all Pages have access to a free, easy, and instantaneous translation tool.

Until now some brands have opted to create different Pages for each country, and assigned a team to translate the brand’s primary Page’s updates and publish them locally. This required a complicated management hierarchy that Facebook and third-parties are only beginning to support through corporate/local Page management tools. The Bing Translation feature will reduce the need to set up localized Pages because a central Page’s updates can be read by audiences that speak a different language.

Translation Could Further Facebook’s Mission

With international fans now able to read the updates of Pages the Like in a language they better understand, Pages should see their posts receiving more Likes, comments, and clicks from these audience segments. This could help brands boost the return on investment on their Facebook marketing spend. Facebook could also get brands spending more on international advertising if it offered automatic translation of ads into the native languages of the users they target.

Still, the most potentially meaningful prospect of the Bing translation tool is how it could facilitate international friendships. If Facebook’s goal is to make the world more open and connected, what better way than allowing users to share with the whole world regardless of the language they speak.

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]