Facebook duplicate Places must be addressed

If you have a small, medium or large business which has a physical location (or locations) you’ve probably taken advantage of Google’s free Places feature. It enables you to claim your business, pop up some pictures, add a bit of a description around your business and even upload some videos as well.

It’s felt by many SEO experts that the more you take care of and maintain your Google Places listing; the more likely you are to rank well in the search results now that Google is giving a huge amount of importance to local in the search results.

Perhaps of equal importance is Facebook Places, which in my experience, hardly any businesses are claiming, protecting and optimising.

Facebook Places are really important, as people can locate and check-in to your business location once they’re within range on their mobile phone. That’s something Google doesn’t really offer yet (although with Google Plus, this will soon change for sure).

Claiming your Facebook Place is a different process in a few ways to Google’s method of verifying a business owner’s credentials, and as is Facebook’s way, it changes almost every week!

The other huge problem for business owners (which I’ve written about in the past), is the multiple instances of the same business location within Facebook. Frankly the situation is nuts and must be addressed by Facebook; the main reason being that people are often confused about which place to check into.

Looking at Sydney Airport’s “Places” above it’s a case of take your pick in terms of which one to “Like”, check in to, trust, etc. And then there are the random Facebook users to contend with who create a place page for Sydney Airport and tell Facebook it’s located in Melbourne’s CBD? Gawd help us!

Claiming is fairly simple and in my experience very fast – much faster than waiting for Google’s letter to arrive in the post! All you need to do is click the, “Is this your business?” link – or you can send the owner a message (if you know who it is and their email address) encouraging them to claim it.

After submitting your claim, you receive an email saying you’ve successfully (or unsuccessfully) claimed the place.

What we’ve had to do for one large national retailer is claim all the places, duplicates and all (we lost a bit of money on this job let me tell ya), rename one version (we picked the most popular by way of check-in’s) of each store to “official place” and “hide” the rest in the admin panel to clean up the duplicates. Horrible.

What that’s done is meant shoppers know exactly which place to check into (there are posters in all the stores encouraging them) which has created a consolidation of check-in’s rather than a morass of confusion. After a lot of hard work, it’s working a treat.

The issue as I see it is that it’s left to brands and business owners to clean up the duplicates, and then it’s an ongoing battle to keep weeding out the new ones which come along all the time, especially if you have developed a check-in strategy.

Not only that, but when Facebook Deals comes to Australia (it can’t be far away now, surely?) people need to be able to check-in to the correct location in order to activate the deal. I’ve no idea how some brands are going to be able to engineer this without a lot of duplicate place cleaning in Facebook. It’s a mess.

While Google Places has some problems, it certainly has nowhere near the level of issues Facebook has.

If anyone knows a better way to address these problems, please share!

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.