Andrew Grinaker | Digital, SEO and Social Media Strategist Blog | Seattle, WA

Everyone is talking about it, so why not? I thought I would give my take on Facebook places. Yes, it has privacy issues, but what social network doesn’t? Here are 5 reasons why I think Facebook places will succeed.

1)   Leveraging 500 Million Users – Foursquare, the most popular location based network, has 3 million users – or less than 1 percent of the total users of Facebook. People are going to start using location based services that have never before, including those that get tagged at places without knowing it.

2)    Connecting Small and Medium Businesses to Customers – Facebook and Google are going head to head in the local search space and utilize Facebook places gives them another connection (and advertising opportunity) with small, local businesses. This may not be technically an advantage for the general public, but assures that Facebook will help advance the platform with the amount of advertising dollars at stake.

3)    It’s Early in the Location Based Game – Yes, Foursquare, Gowalla and Whrrl grabbed the attention when location based applications became popular but that doesn’t mean that the market still isn’t up for grabs. While the social media community is hooked on Foursquare, the general public has not latched on to checking into a location, which means there is still room for growth and advancement.

4)    Developer Network – Facebook will soon be opening up Facebook Places to a developer community and allow for application to pull that information via an API. This will allow for new and exciting tools for Facebook users to access in the coming months.

5)    One Central Social Network to Share – The so-called “power users” who have Facebook, Twitter, and Fousquare accounts have the ability to eliminate one of those web and mobile applications from their checklist. No, this doesn’t mean that Foursquare is going out of business. In fact, they have already seen an increase in registrations with Facebook’s announcement. It just means that you will be able to migrate over users of other location based applications to Facebook, simply because they don’t have to go anywhere else to share their location.

These are just a few points about Facebook Places and why I believe it will be successful. This is an editorial and is based on my observations of the industry.

If you want a guide to using Facebook Places, one of my favorite Social Media content writers, Jolie O’Dell does just that on Mashable.