Facebook Launches Places to Enter the Geo-Location Market

Filed under: Facebook, Social Media — Tags: Facebook, News, social media, update — Joshua Lee @ 10:14 am

Last week, Facebook announced the launch of its latest location product called Places. Similar to other location based social networking platforms such as Foursquare, Facebook Places allows people to “check-in” to an existing location or to add new locations to the platform through their smart phones.

When someone checks in at a place, for example a café or cinema, this shows up in that user’s news feed for their friends to see. Another feature is that it allows subsequent people who later visit the same location to see what their friends thought about the place or what they were doing at the time. Facebook Places goes a step further in social integration by helping to spot friends close by to your location. This gives people the opportunity to engage in spontaneous face to face meetings, and may have wider implications for local business marketing and privacy concerns.

The following video explains what Facebook Places is and what it can be used for:

How to access Facebook Places

Facebook Places is currently available in the United States on the Facebook App for iPhone.

You can also update Places through touch.facebook.com for all other smart phones that support W3 geo-location. There has yet to be news as to when it will become available in Australia.

However it has been announced that Foursquare, Yelp, Gowala and Booyah will be integrated with the Facebook Places API, which can pull information and pictures of the location where a user checks in.

Facebook Places and User Privacy

There has been mention about potential privacy issues associated with Facebook Places. Once a user checks in to a location, the update shows up on that person’s wall and news feed by default. The bigger concern is that it also shows up in the activity stream of the checked in place.

Places give users the ability to tag friends who are with them when checking in to a location, another point of concern for privacy. However, privacy settings for Places can be customised to preference, as with other Facebook features. Allfacebook.com has come up with a four step guide on how to edit your privacy settings for Places.

Using Places for Local Businesses

The launch of Places presents another opportunity for local cafes, restaurants and brick and mortar shops to connect with customers and reward them for checking in to that location. If used and promoted well, Places can be a great marketing tool to help customer retention and repeat visits.

Local businesses can claim their location in Places through a verification process to ensure authenticity. This is done by claiming an existing Place or by creating one to allow others to check-in. Places within Facebook can be merged with a businesses’ Facebook Page to centralise the management of both entities. The advantage is also that the merged Page will be updated to include Place information such as maps and check-ins, as seen below: