We all know by now that Facebook has gotten great at trying out new features whether we have asked for them or not. That being said, it should not come as a great shock that another somewhat in your face feature has sprung up.
Head over to a local page, go ahead – anyone of the local businesses around your area will do. Click on Like and watch what pops up… There it is. Do you see the box running the width of the page under the thumbnail? Now Facebook is recommending what it perceives as being local pages that it feels may be of interest to you. Just think of it as a means of advertising whether you like it or not.
Here is the issue I found with it. When I clicked Like on what I felt was a local page, the suggestions that came up for me spanned the entire US. There were no plain old “Port Orchard Washington” businesses. Instead I was presented with Pages that came from as far away as Britain and Australia. How does this benefit me when I am looking for truly local results?
The short answer is that it cannot. This raises the question as to what Facebook might have been thinking with this weird function. In truth this makes much more sense as a marketing tool that will simply allow business pages that might not otherwise have ever appeared on my radar to suddenly pop up allowing me to find new stuff that might interest me.
This new change seems to go hand in hand with the announcement of the new Graph Search function which also seems like it could benefit marketers more than actual Facebook public users. That being said, what do YOU think that the master plan may be? Is Facebook planning some huge commercial push? We all know that they still need to reverse their fortune on their stock losses, so this may be one big PR issue or does Facebook really think it will help users and that those users will embrace? Let us know your thoughts on this in the comment section below!