By Kelsey Jones
In an attempt to catch onto the online review craze (that includes bigwig websites like Yelp.com and UrbanSpoon) Facebook’s latest feature for Pages is the ability for users to recommend a page to others. This recommendation appears on their news feed and contains a direct link to the page itself.
The Recommendation feature is only available for Pages that are also registered as Places, meaning that a user can ‘check in’ to it. This requires the page administrator to put the business’ exact physical address. Facebook is attempting to merge all Place pages and regular pages into 1 page (their tutorial how to do so is detailed in steps here).
Place Recommendations are a good step towards making Facebook an all-in-one website destination. It is currently a search engine, social networking tool, location-based check-in, and daily deals site. Adding recommendations has now made it easy to share opinions about the places that users attend the most. Of course, as of now, there are no limits on who can place recommendations (for instance, in the graphic above, the administrator of AV Planners wrote the recommendation), thus opening the gates for over-enthusiastic recommendations or spammy recommendations.
There are several ways I can think of that Facebook can implement to help cut down on useless or spammy recommendations—have users vote on recommendations (whether they are useful or not), use profile demographics (length of time they’ve had an account on Facebook, regular profile activity), and overall quality of the recommendation as deemed by an algorithm.
Facebook Place Recommendations has a while to go before it is truly an integral aspect of overall daily Facebook use, but it has promise, if abuse is limited and it is promoted website-wide to all users when they visit a page that has been merged with a Place (or just a Facebook Place).
Have you written any Facebook Place Recommendations yet? Let us know in the comments!
Kelsey Jones
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I didn’t even know this existed, I’m going to see if some of my favorite places offer it. I will still probably use Yelp all the time though.