Building Local Business Pages on Facebook

Yesterday I posted about local business ads on Facebook. Here’s what I said:

Local/small businesses have built pages on MySpace forever . . . I haven’t tried to build a page (beyond my profile) on Facebook. At this point it’s not clear that same “WYSIWYG” usability exists on Facebook, as it does on MySpace. But if so, more SMBs will come and build mini-sites.

Today I discovered that it’s very easy to build profiles/pages for local businesses. It’s the same process people use to build individual profiles (click to enlarge graphics):

… and so on. You get the idea. This is a very simple process and much less daunting than building a traditional website (except with the simple Yahoo! templates).

As Facebook’s site search improves and more local content is added, it eventually becomes (or aspires to be) a Yelp, Citysearch, Yahoo! Local competitor and an alternative to the yellow pages.