Facebook Launching New Features To Enhance ‘Places’

This week Inside Facebook revealed that Facebook was planning on bringing a few new features to their Places product.  Facebook Places launched almost a year ago, a product which has seen decent usage to date.  The new features that are reportedly launching should make it much easier to market places, especially for those with small to no budgets.

Recommendations for Places

Facebook Places currently allows for users to ‘check-in’ or ‘like’ a location, and ‘recommendations’ will be coming soon.  Rumors are that the ‘Recommend This Place’ button will operate much like the “Suggest To Friends” page functionality that was limited only to admins earlier this year.

Once a recommendation has been made the message is published to the news feed and will also show up prominently on the Place’s Page.   Recommendations could also help users who are looking to check-in to a location by displaying recommendation stats along with business names, but this is purely speculation at this point.

Community Edits

Users were given the ability to “suggest edits” to Places a few months back, but Facebook will now be actively looking to fill in missing information for the most popular locations in each city.  To see this in action, search Facebook for a particular city, then click the ‘community edits’ tab in the left rail.

The most popular places (by check-in) are shown and users are given the ability to add missing information directly on the community tab!

While neither of these two enhancements are necessarily earth-shattering, it’s always nice to see Facebook improve their Places product for the better.