We have been speculating exactly what Facebook was up to since the launch of its location based offering Places back in September. Yesterday our favorite social network made the mobile check-in application available to major merchants and thousands of small and midsize businesses with the announcement of Facebook Deals – news made public in a hyped Silicon Valley press event not dissimilar to those hosted by Apple.
So what is the Deal behind Facebook’s latest move?
Deals is designed to connect users of Facebook Places to special offers from brands, with 24 Hour Fitness, Gap and Palms Casino Resort among the first to sign up (Gap has already been dipping its toe in the water of location-based deals, with successful promotions recently running for customers checking into a store on Foursquare. Next week the store-with-the-logo-everyone-has-been-talking-about will give away 10,000 pairs of jeans via Deals.)
So how will it work? On tapping the check in button, users see a list of nearby Places. These will now show yellow coupon icon if they are running a Deal. Users can tap through to the Places page where they can see details about how to claim the Deal, for instance by checking in, or checking in and tagging three friends. Once a user completes the Deal’s instructions, they’ll be shown a confirmation screen which includes the reward, an expiration date, and how many people have also claimed the Deal. This can be shown to an employee of the Place to redeem the reward.
So far so good. Makes sense to combine the holy grail of mobile marketing, the coupon, with the growing popularity of the location based check in. And to the naked eye, Places has seemed redundant until now; with many Facebook users not using the functionality regularly to broadcast their location to an often fairly wide group of contacts accumulated on a page. Add a deal into the mix and that is one heck of a stimulus. And for businesses, the ability to tap into the Facebook ecosystem with location based deals is truly the holy grail of focused marketing.
One point to consider is privacy settings on the application. Surely Facebook will update with some “Groups”-like settings that allow Deals check-ins to be seen only by certain people. There are just some deals that users do not want to broadcast to their entire Facebook friend list, a list that that usually includes work, family and friends for most.
Generally, though, it is likely most people will respond positively to the service. And it could well signify the end of game-based check in services such as Foursquare, SCVNGR and Gowalla – with each only possessing a tiny slice of the audiences Facebook boasts, it is highly likely they will be consumed in some way by Facebook. And the smart coupon providers – Groupon and the simple yet effective Voucher Cloud in the UK for example – will work out a way to integrate to Deals rather than try and fight it. Just before Facebook’s announcement, Groupon introduced a new mobile redemption-tracking app to streamline and improve the merchant experience by allowing merchants to scan and verify Groupons using the built-in camera on their mobile device. (Clearly had a premonition of some sort?)
So what do you think? Has Facebook placed a nail in the coffin of location based marketing, set to spark widespread concerns re privacy; or is this yet another move of genius to make Facebook truly the indispensable marketing platform for brands big and small?
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