Facebook Places

Want to have your own business show up within Facebook Places? For companies that have a physical location it makes sense to have a Facebook Place in order to track the people who are stopping by your store, office, or venue. As such, Facebook has released a new guide for businesses to learn how to merge Facebook Pages and Facebook Places into a single Page. The final result is a newly designed Facebook Page which includes location-relevant information.

While you can view the guide below for all the steps required to claim your Facebook Place and merge it with your Facebook Page, we’ve broken down the process into 3 easy steps.

Step 1: Create Or Claim Your Place

If nobody has checked in to your company’s venue, you’ll need to load up the Facebook iPhone application or Facebook for touch devices on a compatible phone and check if your place exists already. You can do this by searching for the place. If it doesn’t exist, you can quickly create it by clicking on “Add” or the “+” sign depending on whether or not you are using Facebook for touch devices or Facebook for iPhone.

Step 2: Claim The Place As Yours

Facebook will discover the phone number. If the phone number is incorrect you can quickly change it. However before getting to the phone number confirmation, you’ll need to log in to Facebook and search for the Place that you’ve created or check in to. Once you find the venue you can click on the “Is this your business?” link at the bottom of the place as pictured below.

If there is no associated phone number, Facebook requires a more manual verification process. You can find the full explanation in the document which is embedded below.

Step 3: Merge Your Place & Page

The final step is to merge the Place and the Page once you’ve completed the verification process. The result is a combined Page which effectively serves as a local business page. The design is substantially different from existing Facebook Pages, however it’s possible that Facebook will move in this direction for all Pages. 

Done!

In three steps you’ve easily claimed your business and merged it with your Facebook Page. We will be providing more comprehensive guides to Facebook Places for business in the near future. In the meantime, feel free to email us with details about how you are using Facebook Places for your own business!