Why Facebook Places is doomed
When Facebook launched its new geosocial check-in service one week ago, I was convinced it was going to blow its stand-alone competitors completely out of the water simply because it lives where the vast majority of social networking addicts already spend large chunks of time. That would make it hugely accessible and convenient – no need to leave Facebook to broadcast your location such as is necessary with Foursquare or Gowalla. Why go out of your way when it was already right there?
As an SEO, I was excited about it. Check-ins provide another avenue of brand exposure for my clients, and Facebook was telling business owners to claim their profiles. We scouted out the process for our clients by claiming our own company profile. Now, a mere week after Facebook Places was launched, I am ready to predict that it is doomed to fail without some fairly major adjustments. Here’s why.
Checking in is tedious without an iPhone since there is no Android app.
Are you using an iPhone? Great, here’s an app for you to download! Does your phone run on Android? Wow, uh, I guess you can launch your browser, then go to this URL, then wait for it to load, then hit this tab… yeah. Right. I think I’ll stick to Foursquare. Besides, Foursquare gives me nifty badges! What’s my motivation here, Facebook?
While the infamous Facebook/Google rivalry was clearly a factor in Facebook Places’ iPhone-only launch, it’s unclear who shot who in the foot. Did Facebook deliberately avoid launching an Android app? Or did Google decline to let Facebook do it since it has a competing geosocial check-in service? This seems especially suspicious since Facebook made such a huge point of sharing the stage with competitors like Foursquare and Gowalla to tout their collaboration. The iPhone’s exclusivity with AT&T is too restricting, especially when AT&T is notorious for poor service coverage. What good is the check-in feature if there’s no service at the location you’re checking into? Android is the country’s fastest growing platform with the most potential to spread the service quickly. But Facebook and Google hate each other, so…
You can’t add a place unless you’re there right at that moment.
The geolocation aspect is so relentless that if you try to add your business, it pegs your current location as the business address. If it can’t geolocate you, it pegs your business address at the center of the city – as I discovered when I tried to add my company by logging into the mobile URL in a desktop browser. This is completely moronic when you’re trying to build a database of businesses and their accurate locations.
The claiming process is best described as ‘onerous’.
Here’s a screenshot of the verification form:
Do you have your Articles of Incorporation handy? No? Too bad for you. I was able to quickly download ours from the Colorado Secretary of State’s business division, but not all states offer free access to their corporate databases, and those that do may not offer convenient downloadable PDFs.
Perhaps a better question would be why they need this stuff in the first place. Uploading Articles of Incorporation proves only that the business is legal, not that I own it or represent it. Because, remember, I got that download for free from the state. It’s also going to be hard to monetize something that’s so difficult to use. So what’s the point?
Also worth noting: The documentation requirements suggest a manual review process – which means that getting verified will take awhile, especially during the initial mad rush. It’s been two days since I submitted our paperwork, and all I have to show for it is a generic auto-generated email that says “Facebook User Operations has received your inquiry. Stand by as we should be back with you soon.” Wait, so all of this was just for an inquiry??
Facebook apparently hates SEO agencies.
Yeah, the White Hat, Black Belt ninjas work for an agency. Our clients are very busy doctors and lawyers, and often are not very tech savvy. Because of this, they pay us to take care of this whole SEO and social media thing for them. Here’s what the claiming process looks like for an agency:
- Search Facebook for a client’s Places profile. It’s not there, which means we must create one.
- Call our client. Find someone in the office who meets a very specific set of criteria. They must have a smart phone. They must have a Facebook account. They must understand the social check-in concept. They must be comfortable with it despite all of the privacy controversy surrounding every move Facebook makes. They must be able to follow directions, especially if they don’t have an iPhone, because not having an iPhone makes this next part exponentially more difficult.
- Coach our volunteer through the check-in process, which involves finding the Places tab, allowing Facebook to geolocate you, adding the business name, hitting “Add”, then “Check In”, then “Like”. This should be sufficient to create the Places page.
- If it’s still not showing up in the search right away, the check-in should show up in the volunteer’s news feed – but we’re not Facebook friends, so we have get them to email us the link to the Places page.
- Okay, now we finally have a profile to work with! Congratulations! Now we get to ask our client for their EIN and some kind of documentation that proves they are an actual business. As I mentioned before, our clients are busy. BUSY. My guess is that the receptionist we’ve been working with has no idea where there Articles of Incorporation are, and the doctor or the attorney is out of the office all day. They may not know where they’re stashed right off the bat either, and they’re too busy to go digging around looking for it. Oh, and the second we start asking for that kind of stuff, everyone’s guard goes up. “Why do you need that? I don’t understand.”
- Our attempt to claim our client’s Facebook Places profile now is almost certainly dead in the water.
A note about the EIN: This should be pretty easy for the client to find, but Facebook isn’t at all clear on when it is required. The only hint that it might NOT be required is a vague parenthetical statement next to the text field. My best guess is that if you’re incorporated, then it’s required. Obtaining an EIN is not required for general partnerships and sole proprietorships, which often operate on the owner/partner’s social security number. At least, that’s the rule in the banking world, but social media is not banking. Facebook really should clarify when it is and is not required, as well as why the heck they would ever need it in the first place. I don’t tend to get skittish about Big Brother type stuff, but this just strikes me as odd and unnecessary.
A note about uploading business documents: No preferred file formats are indicated. I’m hoping my PDF submission was okay. It didn’t give me any funky unsupported file type messages, so I think we’re in the clear, but I can see this frustrating many people if certain file types are excluded without fair warning.
Phone verification is a tease, and is unlikely to ever happen to you.
The Facebook Help Center very plainly says that phone verification is an option, but it was never once offered to me at any time during the whole confoundingly tedious process. Maybe it populates the phone option if you didn’t have to jump through a million hoops to create a page, similar to how Bing and Google often only offer postcard verification to brand new listings, but I have no evidence on that just yet. The database seems pretty sparse right now, though, so if I’m right, I doubt very many people will ever see the phone option.
The bottom line:
The process of claiming a Facebook Places listing is so onerous from an agency perspective that I can’t recommend claiming a business profile for any of my clients unless they have the required documentation ready to go, can spare a half hour or so of their time at their offices, and are tech and social media savvy enough to just do it on their own. Which essentially means it’s not going to happen very often. Asking us to do it for them is just asking for a world of pain, frustration, misery and sorrow, and still involves copious amounts of our busy clients’ valuable time. And what is there to be gained? Because if it’s really going to be this difficult to use Facebook Places, then it has already lost the geosocial race.
Tags: Facebook Places
