Driving Traffic with Facebook Places

I want to share a little “trick” if you own a directory website that lists public destinations or places, and it may be able to help drive targeted traffic to your website.

In a fashion similar to Google, Facebook has something called “Places,” which includes the address, a map, phone number, website, and fields for other information that can help people learn about the place.  These public and sometimes private places are locations that Facebook users can visit and/or tag/check-in. In most cases, there aren’t owners of these places pages, so there’s no real moderation.

I’ve found that many dog parks are listed as places. When I search Google, DogPark.com listings are often in the top ten results, as are competing websites, and a Facebook Places listing. In most cases, the Facebook places listing has a field for “Add Website.” I’ve been adding the dog park url on DogPark.com to these dog park places listings, and it should help drive traffic to the website.

I think this could potentially be a good traffic opportunity for people who have directory websites that list public places and locations. It benefits the place and also benefits my website as well.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

10 COMMENTS

  1. FB has contacted businesses, including our restaurants, to tell us they are merging their places page with our self managed FB page. This effort caused much confusion because you have a business’ FB page with thousands of fans and daily content/interaction and then all of the sudden FB throws up all these “place” pages. Customers would go there and ask a question which nobody would answer. FB actually called on the old fashion telephone to discuss it.

  2. Yes great find- I do know that google places has a voting type system now showing up on any google search i.e. Critical illness insurance I saw a company with 188 votes 3.5 stars.
    Feel free to vote like +1 and rank our site as well

    • You should use caution with this though. I am sure if Facebook thinks you are spamming, they could easily shut down your FB account. I would only use this if your website adds value to the places listing!

  3. Anyone who is stupid enough to use a “volunteer up all your personal info so we can trick you to revealing it to our advertisers” is not worthy of being involved in marketing.

    You want to put all your DATA you collect in the hands of FacebooK? Do you lie seeing all the commercials and ads of those companies who have invested million when FB went public are now putting FACEBOOK in front of their company brand in TV commercials, to hopefully get people to say “yeah, I want to connect to Visa on Facebook” and hundreds of other major corporations who bought into the “social media” phenon that really is nothing but a bitch of a killer of privacy for its users, who will backlash against it within 24 months, I’m feeling a bit of sorrow for.

    NEVER GIVE ANOTHER COMPANY YOUR DATA YOU PAID FOR IN YOUR ADVERTISEMENT.

    NEVER PUT ANOTHER COMPANY’S NAME IN FRONT OF YOURS FOR GATHERING INFO.

    NEVER PUT YOUR CUSTOMERS’ INFORMATION AT RISK BY ALLOWING THEIR INFO TO ARCHIVE INTO THE BIGGEST DATA GATHERING SERVICE IN THE WORLD: FACEBOOK.

    It’s remarkable how many companies allow their brand to be listed behind Facebook’s link.

    Lot’s of New Media execs need to fired for not figuring this out.

    Cheers, Fecesbook suckers.

  4. @Elliot,

    Here’s the issue outside of just the marketing idiocy of Facebook. The fact that all this personal information controlled by one company, and private, personal information at that, can and WILL be used against you one day, somehow.

    If, God forbid, any enemy country, or even our own country, decided to “create new laws because of some national emergency”, something you posted may place you in the ire of the government in control. It hasn’t even been 100 years since the best information-gathering but most evil government in recent history, the Nazis, ruled most of Europe and some other continents.

    The genocide of the Jews and Slavs by the Nazis was so well documented by the Nazis, that they knew where every Jew was, who was in their extended family, their jobs, their residences, and other minute details worthy of Facebook. I’m pretty sure that if Hitler had Facebook, it would just take a shell corporation and lots of money for him to obtain all those of “Jewish” persuasion, and “perverts” like homosexuals (the Nazi belief), and round them up faster than it did, with 1/1000th of the cost and manpower. The Nazis had details of even how many gold teeth, color of eyes, hair, and a tattooed ID number on their wrist to forever mark EVERY person arrested and sent to concentration camps.

    Here’s the rub – GUARANTEED that none of those German citizens freely living their lives EVER knew that their demise was coming, based on INFORMATION GATHERING of the brownshirts.

    I feel bad for the Arab Spring users who put their names on Facebook to rally their troops. They’ve probably already been categorized, even by Facebook, one way or another, and this data can be retrieved by the next Muslim dictator. Sadly, this puts these people at deadly risk, but also their families and friends.

    History, my friend. The world is an evil place, and having your personal information online FOREVER, and ACCESSIBLE to people you don’t know… I don’t know… you tell me if that sounds “safe” to you.

    I only dumped my huge facebook acct after Sahar recommended it, and it was backed up by at least four other respected domainers I know.

    As far as marketing your site through Facebook, that’s fine without any personal details, but just use the little facebook icon instead of these companies saying “Reach us at “Facebook.com/Visa”. Lame, unless Visa invested millions when FB went public, which I suspect they did.

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