Neworld, Great relationships build great brands

Facebook Places was the big social media story of last week when it was launched in the USA. Although there is no official launch date of the service in Europe as of yet, it has big implications for business as almost 500,000 Irish Facebook users access the network via their mobile. That underlines the importance of getting to know Places in advance of its launch here. Last week I gave an in depth look at the service. Today I’m pulling together some of the best resources on the web that have been released in the meantime.

Facebook Places: A Field Guide – This is one of the first guides to Places from the Mashable team. It provides an overview of how to set up the service, and what it means for users, businesses and developers.

Why Check In?

Location based services are still relatively unused in Ireland. But with such a large portion of Facebook’s 1.73 million Irish users already using the service on their mobile, this could change literally overnight. While that might make the case for businesses to get involved, but why should the average user?

Facebook Places For Businesses

This guide by Inside Facebook explains how the service can be used for business. An interesting part of this post outlines the process by which businesses can claim their location. It seems in the USA Facebook added 14 million businesses to its database by teaming up with a local listings provider. The supplied business phone number was used to verify the business by its owner. If something similar were to happen here, thousands of businesses will have a Facebook Page generated for them, no matter if they set it up or not. These pages look slightly different, but will feature customer interaction, making it important for any business to at least monitor these pages. This official Facebook PDF file also shows how to merge a business places page with a business page.

Privacy

One of the biggest concerns when Facebook makes a product announcement is how it will affect privacy settings. Letting a network of 500+ million users know your exact location at a certain time is a little unsettling. This All Facebook Guide to Privacy Settings should help alleviate some of those concerns. While yesterdays Independent in the UK also highlighted some security concerns and how to tackle them. Knowing just how important this issue would be, Facebook released their own video demonstrating how to use their ‘simple and powerful’ privacy settings. That video is embedded below. If the service is not for you, then this guide explains how to disable Facebook Places.