Check-Ins and the Address on Your Facebook Page

Visitors are already telling their friends

On a busy summer weekend, some of your customers take out their phones and check in on Facebook: a post saying where they are, often with a photograph of what they just bought.

Their friends see it, with the business's name attached and a tap through to its page. It is word of mouth that the customer writes and publishes for you.

Unless the business cannot be found. Then the check-in goes to whichever nearby place Facebook suggests, or to a page someone else created for you, or nowhere.

Most of the time it comes down to one field: the address on your Facebook page.

How check-ins find a business

When someone checks in, Facebook lists places near where they are standing, drawn from pages that have a street address and a spot on the map.

A page with no address, or with the address hidden, generally does not appear. Neither does one whose pin sits three streets away, or whose address belongs to premises the business left years ago.

The customer then picks whatever looks closest, or types the business name and adds it as a new place.

What usually goes wrong

• No street address, because the page was set up in a hurry.
• The previous address, still there years after a move.
• A misplaced pin, often dropped in the middle of town.
• A missing unit number in a mall or shared building.
• A personal profile standing in for a business page.
• An unofficial page nobody at the business knows about.

The last does the most harm, because it keeps growing while nobody watches. Every check-in, photograph and star rating it collects is about your business and out of your hands.

Unofficial pages

When people check in to a place that has no page, or add a business as a new place, Facebook can create a page for it, marked as unofficial and run by nobody.

These pages gather check-ins, photographs and reviews, often under a misspelled name. Customers rarely notice the difference, and nothing posted there gets an answer.

Search Facebook for your business name, likely misspellings and your town, and look for any page you do not manage. Look at the map around your door as well.

Setting the address properly

Start with your own page. In its information settings, enter the full street address with the unit number, exactly as it appears on your website and your Google listing.

Make sure the address is set to show, then check where the pin lands on the map and move it to your actual door if it sits elsewhere.

Choose a category for a place customers visit, such as a shop, restaurant or salon. Categories meant for brands and public figures are not designed for check-ins.

A business run from home that does not want visitors should leave the address off. That is a fair trade: no check-ins, and no strangers at the door.

Claiming and merging duplicates

An unofficial page about your business can be claimed through the option on it that asks whether this is your business. Verification usually means a call to the business phone or a document such as a utility bill.

Once you manage both pages, you can merge the duplicate into your main one. They need similar names and the same address, another reason to fix the address first.

Merging combines the likes and check-ins. Most other content on the duplicate, including posts and reviews, does not come across, so read it first and deal with anything that needs an answer.

If a page cannot be claimed, report it to Facebook as a duplicate of yours.

A worked example

A fudge shop on the main street of a lakeside tourist town does most of its year's trade between June and September, much of it from visitors who stop in once.

Its Facebook page had been set up without an address, because the owner only meant to post opening hours. Visitors trying to check in could not find it.

Someone had added the shop as a new place in its first summer, with the name misspelled and the pin on the public beach two blocks away.

That unofficial page had gathered years of check-ins, dozens of photographs and a few reviews, including a two-star complaint about fudge that melted in a hot car. Nobody at the shop had seen any of it.

The owner added the full address to the real page, moved the pin to the shop door, and claimed the unofficial page by verifying the shop's phone number.

Before merging the two, the owner answered the complaint with advice on carrying fudge home in July heat. Visitors checking in at the counter now find the shop's own page.

Matching the other listings

The address on Facebook should match your website and Google My Business listing exactly: the same street spelling, the same unit format, the same postal code.

Mismatches confuse people as much as systems. A visitor comparing two pages that disagree about where you are has good reason to wonder which one is current.

After a move

Most of these problems start with a move. Change the address on Facebook the week the new premises open, not when someone points it out.

A month later, search for your name again. Customers who checked in during the changeover may have created a place at the new door, and the old one can linger.

The counter-case

Not every business benefits from check-ins. A trade that works at customers' houses, or an office nobody visits, has little to gain and good reason to keep its address private.

A business whose customers rarely use Facebook will see few check-ins wherever the pin sits.

But an unofficial page can appear for anything with a sign out front, so the search is worth doing. For anyone whose customers walk through a door, set the address, fix the pin and claim the duplicates.

Before the weekend

1. Search Facebook for your name and its misspellings.
2. Add the full street address, unit number included.
3. Move the map pin to your door.
4. Match the address to your website and Google listing.
5. Claim any unofficial page about your business.
6. Merge it into your main page.
7. Repeat the search every spring and autumn.

Step five is the one not to skip. An unofficial page keeps collecting check-ins and reviews about your business until someone claims it, and nobody else is going to.

Keeping your Google listing just as current, week by week, is covered in Google opens posts to every business listing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.