Shortly after Facebook Places launched last week I started tooling around with the new location based service in an effort to have a better understanding of how it works.

My first thought was, “this is going to be a big deal.”

And today, that’s still my thought about Facebook Places.

There is one question that that came to mind last week that I couldn’t find an answer for, until now, and I’d like to share it with you. The question had to do with the process of businesses claiming their Facebook Places page.

The image above if of the form that businesses have to fill out in order to claim their Places page.

Facebook Places pages are set up for a business after someone checks in at the businesses location for the first time. Take note of the second line, “Place URL.”

When I saw that I instantly thought to myself, “I wonder what would happen if you put the businesses actual Facebook page URL in instead of the Places URL?”

I never tried it, primarily because I learned that doing so wasn’t needed. After a business claims their Places page they can then merge it with their current Facebook page.

One item to note is the fact that businesses will have the chance to use targeted Facebook advertising to reach individuals that have “Liked” a businesses Places page.

In my opinion, this may fall a touch short – primarily because I’ve not “liked” any of the locations that I’ve checked in at using Places. It would seem more effective to somehow have the chance to use advertising to target anyone that has previously checked in at a location.

[Note: If this was confusing, remember that going forth there are two types of pages on Facebook: the standard page (referred to here as a Facebook page) and the Places page.]

Facebook Places has launched and you’ve probably heard a lot about it at this point. What you may not have done is actually used the new location based service. Here’s a quick photo walkthrough of what you can expect.

This photo is what it looks like when you check in using Facebook Places on the iPhone.

This is how the check in will look on your profile and in the timeline on Facebook.

All location check ins will be lumped in on a community page, which is kind of a cool feature.

At the bottom of each community page there’s an option for business owners to claim their page. When that’s done the community pages change over to standard Facebook pages… which causes a bit of confusion.

If business X already has a page, but claims the community page, it becomes a typical Facebook page. Confused yet? Basically, it seems like theres going to be a way to link community pages to “official” pages so that businesses don’t end up having two pages. Sorry, I’m not sure there’s a very easy way to explain that.

At first glance it seems like Facebook Places is going to be pretty cool – especially when you get a mass number of people in one location.

There’s an article over at Teach to Fish Digital that I was reading a while back and I wanted to share some of with you.

In short, the article highlights one important fact that will make you want to continue reading this post.

“According to the Facebook consultants at BrandGlue, 1 in 500 updates make it to the news feed.”

The article points out three things that help decide whether your posts show up in the news feed or not:

1. Affinity
2. Weight
3. Recency

Now for a little added detail on each.

“Affinity Score – This number defines the relationship between object creator and recipient. Those who comment and like your personal updates have a higher affinity than those that do not.

Weight Score – Each object is assigned a score based on the number of comments and likes it earns. An object with 15 comments and 20 likes has a much greater weight than an object with 0 comments and likes.

Time / Recency Score – This number is a reflection of how long ago the edge was created. Each edge will lose its mojo very quickly. For example, the oldest edge in my news feed right now was created 42 hours ago. Most were created in the past 18 hours.”

Chris has done a good job explaining what each of those items means to you so click over to the article to learn more.

It’s very important for marketers to have an understanding of what this information means and how to apply. Pushing out updates that aren’t getting seen (unless people view the Most Recent feed in Facebook) doesn’t do you much good.