If you have a physical location tied to your Facebook page, you have a much greater chance to build your “like” count, because Facebook recently implemented a feature that prompts users to recommend a Page when they “like” it.
The catch is, Facebook appears to only be doing this with pages that have locations. On the Pages themselves there is a box that displays the recommendations from users in a list. Users can click through to see all.
Here’s what the box looks like when you click Like on a page with a location. It’s a little confusing when you “like” something that isn’t necessarily considered a place (such as a sports team):
Full disclosure: I’m not a Patriots fan.
As mentioned in another article about how Groupon use is damaging business’ reputations, a study recently found that “online consumer reviews substitute for more traditional forms of reputation,” that “consumers do not use all available information and are more responsive to quality changes that are more visible and consumers respond more strongly when a rating contains more information.”
Well, the good news for businesses here, is that it gives users a chance to write more information, as well as the ability to target who they want to see the info. If they share it publicly, it goes to the list on the business’ page. It’s also worth considering that negative info is unlikely to appear very often here, because people aren’t as likely to leave a negative response when they opt to “recommend” a page.
Facebook appears to be putting more emphasis on Facebook as a promotional business tool, while businesses continue to wait to see what Google has in store with Google+ business profiles. Google just bought Zagat, of course, and it will be interesting to see how this is integrated with all of Google’s other business offerings (like Place Pages in search), and how they converge on the business profile.
That is really all beside the point, however. Clearly Facebook is the king of social networks, and right now, that’s where visibility matters most. If you include a location on your page, you’re increasing the chance more people will be exposed to that page, and in a positive light.
In a month’s time, Americans collectively spent over a century on Facebook.
