Facebook Reviews Are Now Being Picked Up by Google Places

This past week I saw something really wild and wanted to share it with you. I saw that in a Google Places site reviews had been picked up from Facebook of all places. Wow that is big news!

We are going to put the pieces of this puzzle together for you and need your help to do it!

Now, what I am not sure of is if you create a FBML page and add your website reviews there will the reviews be picked up or is Google only picking up reviews from people using the Facebook Business Page reviews app. If I had to guess I would say from the application.

As I do additional testing this week on how reviews from Facebook are picked up; meaning if I can ascertain whether you can simply add your own website reviews or if other Facebook users have to review you while they are logged in to their own accounts, I will make sure to let you know at Facebook. In the mean time, this is exactly what we are going to do to test and I sure would appreciate it if you can help us out on this one.

1. I am going to create a tab in one of my Facebook Business Page accounts and load a sampling of my website reviews to the new FBML page I will create. I will even try to have the reviews coded using Google’s hReview tags. You can visit my page here. While you are there make sure to like this business page that I am testing on as I will only send out a note of success or failure through Facebook to fans. This is not my main Facebook page but one I have created to make sure I hold onto my business name.
2. I am going to turn on the application for Facebook reviews in my main Facebook Business page account and solicit reviews from clients on that page. If you are not already a fan, make sure to like this page as I will also only be sending out the results to fans of this page. You need only fan one page to get the actual results.

So check out the two pages, look in the left nav bar for the reviews link, like the page, and if you want leave a friendly review. Then when I can see what is going on I will send the results out via Facebook to all of our fans at both pages.

Thanks for your help in advance, this could be a great mini whitepaper!