Lollipop Local

It was a comment on a client’s Places Page, rather than the wall of their Facebook Business Page which reminded me that I needed to sort out merging the two.

This is a completely different process to the merge Facebook Pages function.

Why Do I need a Facebook Places Page?

Facebook Places Pages are becoming more and more common due to the new picture tagging and mapping facility which allows users to map their photographs to specific Places. If you have a bricks and mortar business, you need to have a Places page for Facebook users to check in and then map images to – and you should encourage visitors to do so. It’s all about traffic.

Claiming Your Facebook Places Page

For this particular client, having set up the Places Page some months before to allow people to use the check-in facility on their smart phones and take advantage of the social media and SEO possibilities, it had sat there gathering the occasional visitor until recently when an update requested that the Page should be claimed in the name of the owner (again!).

This done, Facebook sent us another message:

Your claim has been approved. You can now manage your Place information and publish updates to the News Feeds of people who like your Place.

In addition, if you admin a similar page, you may be able to merge your Place into your page. To do so:

1. Visit your existing page and click ‘Edit Page’
2. Go to the resources tab and if available, click ‘Merge duplicate pages.’ If the merge option is available, you will see a list of pages you admin that are eligible to be merged.

I had not done this when the option first became available a year or so ago because of the problems encountered by many other social media managers. However, with mobile Facebook check-ins becoming more and more popular, it is wise to take advantage of this traffic to help boost the authority of the Page, which can only help with Edgerank. And the process seems to have been simplified after the initial teething troubles.

Merge Facebook Business and Places Pages

Having been given the instruction to make the merge, I decided to take the plunge and make it happen to avoid any more confusion for new visitors over which Page was which. Remember, the Places Page and Business Page must have the same name and address and you have to be the admin for both.

UPDATE: Make sure that you are in the Page which has the most information completed as if you merge from the page with the least completed information, that is the info that you will keep. Only the likes and/or check ins will come over from the other page, not all the pictures and other information so if you go the wrong way, you will have an awful lot of extra work to do – as one client discovered when they tried to do it on their own.

After one very concerning moment, where it looked as if the Places Page had disappeared, along with the check-in facility, I realised that an updated Places Page (complete with profile picture taken from the Business Page) appears when you try to ‘check in’ from your Facebook app on your mobile and that activity now appears on both your profile and as an incremental number to a ‘* was here’ feature underneath the number of likes on the Business Page.

Facebook plays a crucial role when you’re using social media for business so it is important to make the most of every opportunity to interact with your customer base – particularly when it relates to the local mobile market.

Of course, with the new Add to Maps facility on Facebook, the creation of Places pages has become even easier… and the need to merge them with the existing Business Page even more crucial. However, there can still be problems as I discovered when I tried to merge my own Places and Business Pages.

Problems with merging Facebook Business and Places Pages

For some reason, on my Business Page, the location was wrong, Lollipop Local had been situated somewhere between Blackpool and Wigan. This meant that, when I tried to merge the Business Page with the Places Page, I was told that the two addresses were too far apart so a merge was not possible.

You’d think that making sure the address fields were exact would do it, but no matter what we did, the map image in the backend of the Business Page remain fixed near Wigan. Then we realised that we could move the map marker half an inch in either direction from its current location.

And so started a very slow journey to take the red pin from Wigan to Leigh-on-Sea, a journey of several hundred miles.

Facebook have a page in their Help Centre where you can find out more about Facebook Places.

Find out how to change a Personal Profile into a Business Page and retain the friends that have been accumulated.

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Tags: merge facebook pages

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2012 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Facebook, Local SEO, Social Media and SEO, Social Media For Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.