Facebook Nearby Updates and How Local Businesses Can React

Facebook Nearby Gets a Facelift
Last Monday, Facebook released updates to its check-in feature “Nearby” in an effort to bring some competition to social sites like Yelp and Foursquare. Each month millions of Facebook users check in with the service, reporting their whereabouts to their friends. Now, Facebook is using that information to show you places you will most likely be interested in.

How does it do it? With the update, Facebook will consider your proximity to a place with the amount of check-ins, Likes, star ratings and recommendations made by your friends and other users. The update also allows users to search through 7 other categories, which include Restaurants, Coffee, Night Life, Outdoors, Arts, Hotels and Shopping. From each category, there are subcategories to further help narrow to your desired results.

Hurricane Isaac & Social Media: Not Just For Memes & Self Portraits

What were we to do? Hurricane Isaac is raging outside our doors, winds ripping down the street at 100 miles an hour, suddenly our power dies and our city goes dark. New Orleanians are trapped inside our homes without a way to connect to the outside world. At this point we hopefully aren’t wasting precious phone battery playing Tetris or Words with Friends, because this is when social media takes a greater importance than creeping on our friends from high school.