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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