Facebook Places Tweak Perfect for Brands Like Applebee’s. Next Up: Companies …

Earlier this month Inside Facebook reported that Facebook is launching a limited private beta of tools that will provide a new parent-child management structure for Places. Essentially this means companies will be able to administrate all the Places pages of the local instances of their business. Foodservice, retail, insurance and other industries are already setting up Places for each of their branches to facilitate local marketing and encourage checkins, Inside Facebook said at the time.

Little has been further announced – except for comments by Scott Gulbransen, Applebee’s director of social media and digital content, in Nation’s Restaurant News. Gulbransen, who appears to be familiar with the new toolset, told the publication that it gives the chain more local functionality in Facebook Places. In some ways, the new parent-child admin page is the industry’s answer to Facebook Deals and Groupon and all its clones, which are aimed at local, single merchants, he also said  – not large chains such as Applebee’s.

The new tools allow the chain to adjust offers based on market conditions, he says. “Before it was much more clunky and we had to redevelop and redeploy them one at a time. You also can pull some triggers on offers and communications to drive traffic [on a] day or daypart where you need it.”

Single Merchant Strategy

Now it appears that Facebook is targeting those local single merchants, Gulbransen referenced, with another tweak to Places. As reported by Inside Facebook in a separate post, Facebook is subtly enlisting friends of local businesses to claim their Place – the first step, as Inside Facebook says, to getting them to buy ads. 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?’, IF reports. “They can then submit an email address or friend’s name, allowing Facebook to contact the owner and ask them to claim the Page.”

A Primary Geolocation App

Although this has probably been the longest three weeks of Facebook’s life, behind the hype of Google+ it is clear Facebook is still the dominant social media venue. Places is a case in point: About four in 10 (42%) smartphone users consider Facebook Places their primary geolocation app, while roughly a quarter of the sample each choose Google Latitude and Foursquare, respectively, according to a new study from digital marketing agency White Horse.

Twitter Places, Gowalla, and Whrrl collectively account for only 6%. White Horse analysis suggests that Facebook Places has such strong adoption numbers because of the incidental lift provided by the success of the Facebook mobile app, which White Horse says was the most downloaded app on the planet at the time the report was released. If even a quarter of that number were in the US, user experimentation alone would make Facebook the leader in terms of gross market penetration.

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Facebook Hustler’s Guide For Business

Parneet Gosal

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Facebook is a marketing hustler’s paradise, earned media at it’s very best. Much like other forms of social media, it democratizes online access to customers by allowing savvy, scrappy brands to appear in friends’ home feed and get play on a negligible budget. Much of this has to do with EdgeRank, Facebook’s answer to Google’s search algorithm. Not convinced? Here are some eye-popping statistics that might help change your mind:

• Facebook users interact with more than 900 pages, groups and events daily. The average user is connected to more than 80 pages and events.
• 80-88% of users don’t return to a page after liking it.
• Users can view content updates from both friends and pages they’ve liked in one of two ways. Roughly half the users choose to view updates explicitly by recency, while the other half choose to view by relevance as determined in the next bullet.
• The order in which content updates display a user’s feed depends on three factor – the affinity between a content creator and the user, content type e.g. comments are more influential than likes while videos and links are considered better than straight-up text for EdgeRank purposes, and finally recency with newest content placed higher. TechCrunch breaks these down well in this post. Among content types, content is prioritized in the following order – photos and videos, internal links to Facebook pages, external links to another website, and finally text updates. Comments on updates are considered gold when it comes to EdgeRank.
• At any point, a user may choose to remove an update from their feed by hitting “x” against it in their feed.

In the spirit of democratization, here are Top 5 Tips in a Hustler’s Guide that will allow even Facebook Page novices to make a dent in their prospect acquisition goals.

1. Content is king and queen. Obvious but really hard to accomplish. For a higher EdgeRank, stay on message; post focused content updates that will interest your target audience and friends on Facebook. Don’t stalk your friends and if you’re a brand avoid commenting on your friends’ wall.
2. Use content that encourages interaction – that includes videos, Facebook Polls and social sweepstakes. Social sweepstakes are particularly effective as they allow all Facebook users looking for prizes in specific categories to participate in the sweepstakes and encourage them to go a step further by liking the page. Facebook Polls are effective as they encourage one-click participation. Running contests by asking users to submit comments and to vote for comments by hitting the like button against each can be particularly effective. Such contests encourage interaction, the various comments and likes ensure that the page gets wide distribution on Facebook and is placed close to the top of users’ feed.
3. Less is more, unlike Twitter. Beware of posting too often on Facebook. Four to five times a week should do the trick, per this thorough breakdown of optimal frequency.
4. Consider posting on the weekend when users have time to surf and catch up with friends.
5. Facebook engineers consider updates posted or scheduled in advance via third party APIs such as Hootsuite anathema to EdgeRank. That means manually posting updates on the website may be old-fashioned but it pays dividends in higher EdgeRank. That said, if you’re going away on vacation by all means schedule updates in advance – even marketing mavericks need time off.

Originally published on Seedwalker

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