Foursquare launched a change to their brand pages last night that makes the pages much more friendly to chains.

When claimed venues are linked to a brand page, users now get a map showing all the nearest stores from the particular chain right on the page. A new box has been added that shows which of their friends have visited any of the chain’s stores.

On the venue pages, each store that’s part of a chain now also gets a box that shows its three nearest sister stores and a link back to the page. This makes it easy to find another nearby store that might be more convenient.

For chains whose venues were already claimed by a page, the venues are already linked. For chains without a page, it’s easy to link venues to a new page either one by one or in bulk.

These features work the same for colleges, too.

Brand pages were once recommended mainly for companies that didn’t have physical locations, but they’ve become more and more common for chains. With these new features, they’re now a must, since they really tie all of a company’s venues together. Expect even more benefits when these features trickle down to the mobile apps.

What do you think of the change?

Related posts:

1. Old brand pages are now new brand pages
2. Foursquare brand managers can now edit their own pages
3. Foursquare redesigns brand pages to focus more on recent activity