Facebook Makes a Stronger Case for a Solid Local Business Page

Facebook quietly released an updated version of Facebook Places in July 2014. We did our research and found it worth no more than a mention within Mary's What's New in Local Search updates. However, their latest updates to the system and the addition of the Places Directory have us taking more notice.

To catch you up, Facebook Places utilizes reviews, pictures, and check-ins to provide a strong local listing for businesses that's personalized to include information specific to the users, which is all meant to be a strong competitor to the likes of Yelp, Foursquare, and TripAdvisor.

The above-the-fold view is dominated by a large city picture and includes these main categories: Restaurants, Hotels, Bars, Cafes, Public Attractions, and Arts & Entertainment. Each of these categories is also featured on the first page when you search Facebook Places by city. The top 5 results are displayed with a picture, address, star rating, spending scale, and one featured result has a single sentence review (this is where your friend's review would go, when applicable). The secondary list of categories is: Gyms, Movie Theatres, Schools, Theatres, Grocery Stores, Landmarks, and Cities Nearby.

Once you've clicked into the city specific pages you're shown a large array of personalized information about the city that includes links to a public version of the Facebook Business page of prominent eateries, businesses and attractions.

The take away is that your Facebook Business page is being crawled and indexed by Google, which is just another reason to build out your reviews and business page details. Facebook is doing its best to push into the very competitive Local Search Directory niche and the good news is that all of their efforts have the potential to gain your business's Facebook Business page more exposure. So far Facebook has not made a big enough splash in the local or organic search ...