[tweetmeme]If your Facebook business page doubles as a Facebook Place, you’re in luck. The social networking giant recently unveiled a new tool to promote your business. When one of your fans visits your wall, they can recommend your page to their friends. The recommendation will display in their news feed and show up on their own wall.
Recommendations for Facebook Places
Here’s how it works:
A recommendation box is displayed on the right hand side of the Facebook place wall like so:
Once you write the recommendation, you can then choose who you want to share it with – Everyone, Friends only, or you can customize it to Friends of Friends or Specific People.
The recommendation is then shared with your friends on your wall and in your own news feed:
I suppose the cynical person might say Facebook is just trying to capitalize on Yelp’s popularity. And I suppose they would have a point. But it really makes perfect sense. There have been several studies that show people rely on recommendations from their friends and family to make purchasing decisions. A Harris Interactive study from June, 2010 found that 71% of those surveyed claimed reviews from family members or friends exert a “great deal” of influence on whether or not to use a particular company, brand or product.
Meanwile, the GlobalWebIndex “Annual Report 2011,” which includes data from Trendstream and Lightspeed Research, found that Internet users worldwide reported a nearly 50% increase in their trust of social network contacts giving product recommendations, and a 21% increase for microblog contacts.
So my advice to Facebook page owners is to ask your satisfied friends and customers to start recommending your page to their friends. That’s what leveraging the power of social media is all about!
For more Facebook marketing strategies, visit my Facebook page at www.fb.com/gloriarandcopywriter.
Thanks Gloria, I just saw this and now I know why 2 new people “liked” the Fan Page.
I wonder what Facebook plans to do about negative, slanderous, or unacceptable recommendations. Business owners get pretty upset with Yelp for not being able to remove negative comments. Will Facebook monitor these (doubtful), or remove them on request?
That’s an excellent question. Facebook doesn’t provide any information about this possibility in their help section. I submitted a “suggestion” to them about giving owners option to remove negative comments on request. We’ll have to wait and see if they address this issue.
Neither one of my business places pages have this recommendation box on them…..Why and how can i get it on my pages……..
Anthony,
Is one of your Facebook pages called First Generation Crossfit? If so, I just checked it and saw the recommendation box there in the upper right hand corner. It may be that it’s not visible to you as an admin, but your fans and non-fans can see it.
thanks for the information it will realy help
Thanks for this – the Facebook page for my blog only has 3 fans so far, so I have a lot more work to do. Not being a commercial organisation I’m wary of buying ads though – for those of us who blog as a hobby that’s not really feasible.
Ads can be expensive, so I would only do them for a very short term, and for a little money to experiment. How are you promoting your Facebook page? Make sure the icons you have on your website point to your page, and include links in all of your promotional material. Ask your friends to fan the page too.
Hi Gloria,
Thanks for this.
I’m curious as to how you set this up. Mr and Mrs Smith https://www.facebook.com/smithhotels are doing a great job with it and seem to be set up as a ‘place’ with their category ‘travel and leisure’. I would like to do this with a business I work with but when I try to set them up as a ‘place’ I cannot select ‘travel and leisure’ as a category, that’s only available if I set them up as a business or organisation. Any ideas?
Hi Kathryn,
You didn’t say what type of travel business this is, but if you select “local business and place” when creating your facebook page, there are a variety of travel-related categories to choose from including hotel, tours/sightseeing, etc. I’m sure there must be a category that fits your business. If you still have trouble, let me know what the business is. You can also email me directly: gloria@gloriarand.com.