Facebook Places works on the mobile Facebook application and allows you to “check-in” when you arrive at a business. You can see if you have other friends nearby. Facebook’s new service is important because they already have over 500 million people with registered profiles so they can enter this business as the leader without much effort.

While the usage of this service is relatively small compared to other Facebook services, you should expect it to grow and provide another way of building a community on Facebook.

During our tests, we noticed that the recommendations used our geographic location and previous web history. As a result, we were more likely to see local search phrases than more popular national phrases. For example, when searching for “dentist in” we saw phrases for our immediate area instead of los angeles or new york as you would expect at a national level.

Adwords users will need to test advertising on shorter keyword and longer keyword phrases since Google Instant automatically updates the ads that you see as you complete your search phrase. There may be cases where you want to advertise on general keywords in order to jump ahead of the competition. For example, if you were a hotel in Orlando, you might consider advertising on the general term Orlando instead of Orlando Hotels in order to get your ad in front of other ads.

Finally, like the autocompletion feature, Google Instant is a great way to discover what the popular searches are for your primary terms. Using our Dentist example, when I search for Dentist the suggested searches are Dentist Salary, Dentist Reviews, Dentist Ratings. Carpet Cleaning SEO

For a few months we have been looking at the growing number of sites adding Facebook Like integration. These are the buttons on many sites that let you select Like using your Facebook account. Industry experts have predicted that these social Like links could be used for a new social search engine. We couldn’t see a pure Facebook social search because your friends can only help search results for certain things (gadgets, restaurants, movies, etc…).

Bing is launching a hybrid approach. Bing has announced a deal and partially launched a new UI where search results can include endorsements from your friends on social networks. Imagine looking for movies and seeing results in Bing that include your friends who liked it. An endorsement from a friend could be far more important than anonymous reviews.

It is great to see Bing launching this first. It creates a clear point of differentiation with Bing. Google needs some real competition and Facebook enhanced search results on Bing will be attractive to the legions of Facebook users out there. Carpet Cleaning Websites

Traditional offline media (Yellow Pages and Newspaper) decreased by another 3% in 2010. More than 75% of people use an online source (search engine, local sites or Internet yellow page) as their primary source of local business information.

While search engines own the biggest share, social media sites and mobile device apps are growing in importance. Respondents to the survey said they were looking for special offers/incentives, regular content and photo updates on social media hubs.

This information does not surprise any of us but there are many small businesses that are investing a large part of their marketing budget in declining yellow page media.