Save your money. Claim your own Facebook Place.
Five hundred dollars to have a third-party consultant claim your Facebook Place on your behalf because it is "complicated to do if you don't have experience"?!
Give me a break. This is absolutely outrageous; but true. It is what is being charged by a high profile seo company located in Vancouver.
For those of you who don't know, here is the "scoop" on Facebook Places in Canada and why you should care about it:
- The Facebook Places feature, a mobile application, became available to Canadians in September of this year.
- It allows Facebook users to "check in" at your place of business, literally telling all their Friends where they are.
- With over 500 million Facebook users sharing information, Facebook provides a free way for you to reach an incredible number of potential clients.
- By Claiming your Facebook Place you can manage your Place's address and other business information, thus ensuring the information always remains current.
My advice to You
- Claim your Facebook Place now, whether you intend to use it right away or not. The last thing you want is to discover someone else has "squatted" on your Place, or that the backlog of requests for claiming has led to an extremely long wait time.
- Save your money. Do it yourself. Use all the information readily made available by Facebook.
How to Claim you Facebook Place
There is already alot of good content online about this, so I am not going to go into detail. Here it is in a nutshell:
- Search for your Place on Facebook. If no Place exists, your will have to create a new Place using a supported web-enabled mobile device. Creating a new Place is the most difficult step in the process - but still a very easy one.
- Once you have found (or created) your Place in Facebook, simply click on the "Is this your business?" link at the bottom of the place.
- Complete the verification process to claim you Place. This is either done through a phone call verification or through uploading of specific documents, such as a utility bill. (We used a Bar card the client's online Law Society database record as proof, because he leased office space in a Law Chambers and didn't have a utility bill with the address on it.)
- Then you just have to wait. And wait and wait. We waited about 3 weeks for approval.
Bottom Line
Claim your Place. Do it now. And do it yourself. Save your hard earned money for the upcoming holiday season.
Comments (2)
Read through and enter the discussion by using the form at the endGyi Tsakalakis - November 19, 2010 12:23 PM
Natalie, couldn't agree more. In fact, legal professionals should head to getlisted.org and claim all their major profiles there for free.
However, having a comprehensive local web strategy is about more than simply claiming a couple profiles. Competitive citation analysis and link building requires leg work.
But I completely agree with you, $500 for Google Places claiming is a complete scam, in my humble opinion.
Natalie Waddell - November 19, 2010 3:20 PM
Thanks for your fantastic input Gyi!
Unfortunately, like many of the great services available online, the getlisted.org doesn't (yet?) work for Canadian businesses. So for our Canadian readers, it isn't so easy to claim all their local profiles (and even to know which ones they should be concerned about from an seo point of view). Do you, or anyone else out there, know of a similar service that caters to us up here North of the 49th?
You are correct in that claiming them and "maximizing" them are two different things. For example, someone might be able to figure out how to claim their Google Place (aka Google Local Listing) and fill out the fundamentals. But in doing so they may, inadvertently, create a negative impact on their Google Places' rankings because they did a faux pas (for example selecting too many "categories" because they think the more the merrier or the BIG one of faking client reviews.) And they probably don't know that implementing an hcard on their website that reflects the information on their Google Place profile is going to further support their rankings.
I really wrote this post because I was "dumb-founded" (and actually disgusted) when I saw the "special pricing" this reputable company was offering. Nothing gets my blood boiling more than someone out there trying to pull the wool over someone's eyes in the internet marketing industry. Makes it hard for the rest of us honest folks :)