How to turn your Facebook Place into a Facebook Page

When lots of companies and individuals create a Facebook page, Facebook will automatically turn it into a ‘Facebook Place’.
This can be annoying for those companies as it isn’t what they expect when they create their page.
This article will highlight the differences between a Facebook place and a Facebook page, and then tell you how to turn your Facebook place into a page.

What’s the difference between a Facebook page and a place?

Facebook Pages

A Facebook page is the standard business page. It is an area on Facebook where companies can interact with the audience.
The page will allow your audience to ‘like’ you. This means that your updates will appear in their news feeds amongst their friends updates.
Facebook will provide your page with ‘insights’. This is their name for page analytics.
It allows you to see your ‘like’ growth, demographics of your audience, and statistics about your individual posts.

Facebook Places

A Facebook place has the same functionality as the pages; however it is aimed at the companies or organisations that have a physical location.
This is useful if your company is a coffee shop or estate agents where you want people to come into your store.
Additional options are available within the page admin; these allow you to specify your company location and state additional information, such as parking availability.
The most significant difference between a Place and Page is the check in functionality. This allows visitors to your location to say that they have been to your location through a mobile device.
You can use adverts that target people who have checked into your location or give special deals to those visitors.
When a visitor checks in, a message goes out on their news feed that lets their friends know they are at your location, this is a great opportunity to promote your business through the Facebook news feed, for very little cost.
Unfortunately, a place can’t deal with multiple locations.
If your company is spread across different addresses, I would suggest you either create multiple places for each location, or combine all the places into a page (combining is the preferred option here).

How to tell if your Facebook page is a place

There a few ways to determine if whether you have a Facebook place or page:

1. Type the page name into the search bar – You will see either a ‘Pages’ or ‘Places’ title
2. On your page, if there is a ‘were here’ option under the title, you have a place
3. If there is a map on the about page, it’s likely you have a place

Convert your Facebook place to a page

Changing your place to a page is very simple:

Update your Facebook page category:

1. Go to your page
2. Click ‘Edit page’
3. Click ‘Update Info’
4. Select any category other than ‘Local businesses’

Remove your location:

1. Go to your page
2. Click ‘Edit page’
3. Click ‘Update info’
4. Remove your address, City / town and postcode
5. To the right of the ‘Address’ field, there is a dropdown, click the down arrow and then ‘No physical street address’
6. Click ‘Save changes’ at the bottom
7. Go back to the address section, there will now be a yellow box. Click ‘remove this Place’

And that is all there is to it. This change might take up to 24 hours to come into effect, however it is normally changed quicker than that.
If you want to change back to a Facebook place, just add in your address again!

If you found this post useful, I would love to hear from you in the comments below. Similarly, if it hasn’t worked for you then let me know and I will do my best to help.