Facebook Places in its current state is a work in progress. They seem to be taking the approach of launching first and seeing where things lead. This practice is of course one that has certainly served Facebook, and others, well in the past; and in fact in the SEO world the practice of acting now, analyzing, and then forming your hypothesis is often how the best breakthroughs are discovered. However in the case of Facebook Places the learn-as you-go strategy has made things a bit challenging for us in terms of keeping our clients in-the-know in this area.
We are hoping that this post will act as the most current status update for our clients as well as for those of you who visit our blog regularly. So, hopefully you find this update helpful but stay tuned because by the time I finish writing this post things will have likely changed again.
Currently, through our relationship with Facebook we update our clients location based information including description, address, city, state, phone number, hours of operation and vanity URL. We are also actively managing check-in deals for our clients.
The way that Facebook Places is currently structured, any data that is managed via an overall Parent/Child page association strategy will replace any data that had previously been submitted by an individual franchisee or SMB. Those previously “claimed” Z/SMB pages then become a part of the overall enterprise level group of locations.
When running FB Places check-in deals on a national level any check-in deals that a franchisee or SMB has been running on their own would also be supplanted by the national, or enterprise level, check-in deal.
So how does this affect your franchisees as a whole? From our experience the percentage of franchisees that are currently managing their own Facebook Places pages and/or running check-in deals is pretty low in the aggregate, but that percentage does change depending on which vertical the client is involved in. Because of the overall low percentage of Z’s we’ve seen as being actively engaged in this area it still makes sense to get all of
your ducks in a row at an enterprise level, and the earlier the better.
However, if a particular client or company has an unusually large percentage of franchises who are actively engaged here, and have claimed their own Facebook Place pages, then the only course of action presently available for preventing their efforts from being usurped by your enterprise level efforts is to run manual searches on every location in order to compile a list of place pages that are being actively managed. Once you compile your list of “active” locations you can then remove those from your overall management efforts prior to launch.
Outside of the aforementioned idiosyncrasies, there are some additional points of interest regarding Facebook Places:
- We do currently report on Facebook Places activity for clients in bulk form.
- The format in which they present their check-in deals has changed drastically in the past couple of weeks concerning how and when the check-in deals can be seen.
Overall, when working in the Location Based Services realm, be very careful as to how you approach your efforts as they could have long-standing repercussions. Working to make all parties happy can be a slippery slope and it’s important to give adequate control to franchisees while maintaining enterprise level control for brand autonomy and quality standards.
Until next time…