Last week, Facebook introduced Facebook Deals, a new way for brands to encourage customers to “check in” to their location using Facebook Places by offering incentives. Here’s a video outlining in more detail how the service works:
There are currently four different types of deals that a brand can offer:
Individual Deal
Reward individuals when they check in at your location.
Friend Deal
Reward groups when they check in together.
Loyalty Deal
Reward customers who check in at your location a certain number of times.
Charity Deal
Pledge to donate to a charity of your choice when customers check in.
The new Facebook Deals platform launched with a number of brands, most notably Gap, which last week gave away a pair of free jeans to the first 10,000 customers to check in to Gap through Facebook Places. Any brand can start offering these deals. Check out this video to see how you can create a deal. Despite the impression you get from the launch partners, Facebook Deals really is geared toward local brands with a single location they’ve claimed. This means if you’re a national brand that has multiple locations and hasn’t claimed a place yet on Facebook, it’s best to get in touch with your Facebook media rep to see how to best conduct a deal campaign.
Even with the exciting new opportunities in Facebook Deals, you may have heard recent conversation around location-based services taking on a skeptical tone. Pew Internet recently released a report that said only 4% of online Americans have used location-based services. We think it’s important to take this report with a grain of salt. When this particular survey was put in-field, existing location-based services such as Foursquare may have only had 3 million registered members, but Facebook Places hadn’t yet been announced. If even a fraction of the 140 million U.S. Facebook users started using Facebook Places, it would represent a much larger audience than the 4% Pew is reporting.
In a recent New York Times blog post, the author of the Pew report, Kathryn Zickuhr, says she is “surprised at how companies building location into their business plans seemed to be far ahead of people using such services in their day-to-day lives.” We don’t think it should be surprising. The digital lives of our customers change so rapidly from year to year that it’s becoming the job of every good brand steward to anticipate where things are headed.
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