Facebook recently announced its geotagging feature called Facebook Places. The product was introduced yesterday in the United States and will gradually roll out in other countries. The company is collaborating with several location-based companies, including Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Booyah, and Localeze. Like other location-based services, Places already have existing locations and users can add new locations. The feature is intended for mobile use and Facebook has already launched the iPhone app.

Facebook Places Features

Users can share the following features on Facebook:

1. Check-In
2. Tag Friends with You
3. What are you doing: It is similar to status update. It updates your profile with the activity and if you have tagged a friend.

Facebook Privacy Setting

By default check-ins are visible to “Friends Only” but users can customize their privacy setting. By checking in you are giving Facebook permission to post it on your wall and News Feed. Privacy for Facebook Places includes:

• Places I check in to
• Include me in “People Here Now” after I check in: By checking the enable option anyone can see who are currently checked in at a location
• Friends can check me in to Places: Enabling this option allows your friends to check in at a place with them

Add or Report a Place

As mentioned before you can add a place. Facebook allows users to Flag a place for:

• Incorrect information
• Abusive
• Permanently closed
• Duplicate

I personally think that the feature needs some improvement. Earlier I tried to check-in at Resite Online. As Facebook did not have the Place available, I added it. It created a new local business page for Resite. We already had a Facebook page so it will be confusing to the users as there are two pages for the same business.

For more information visit: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1080

Wouldn’t it be helpful if you could see your resident or perspective clients’ behavior when they are visiting your website? It’s easier than you think, and no crystal ball is needed! By adding a simple Web Analytics tool to your website and then reviewing the information.

Web Analytics not only gives you a glimpse into the mind of your website visitors, it also gives you a better understanding of their behavior online and it will also tells you what they are trying to accomplish when they are visiting your site. With the information, you have everything you need to give visitors the answers their looking for-all on your site!

It will help you to prioritize the pages  that you should be focusing on. For example: you can optimize or advertise the pages that have low performance. The data gathered from Web Analytics takes the guesswork out of writing and managing the content, property images, website layout and other important features, which could be vastly different from what the Web Designer/Content write had in mind when the website was created.

Here are some pointers for using your Web Analytics tool:

• Decide the goal(s) of your website. Write down the goals and compare it with the information from the Web Analytics tool.
• Traffic Sources: Analyze how visitors are reaching your website; are they coming from Search Engines, direct traffic, or referring websites. Referring sites data will list the sites that are sending traffic to your website, such as an Internet Listing Site where you are advertising.
• Page Visits and Time on Site: Analyze what pages renters are visiting while they are on your site. You may find that one of your floor plan is visited by renters more than anticipated. This gives you an opportunity to advertise this floor plan and get more renters to the website.
• Bounce Rate: This metrics presents the average percentage of visitors who left the site right after arriving there. If any of your webpage has a high bounce rate then you may need to change the content to cater to their needs.
• Update your website with the changes, analyze the results from those changes and continue to improve your website.

There are many free and paid Web Analytics tools with plenty of useful features in the market, such as Google Analytics, Urchin, and Omniture. Installation for some of these tools require very little time. If you want to learn about your renters’ behavior online, there is no better or easier way than Web Analytics!