There is a new player in town when it comes to local search- and really, no one should have been surprised that Facebook announced on November 3rd that they’d be rolling out Facebook Deals. Facebook has already been doing quite a bit to pull together two very powerful players in search marketing: social search and local search. The pairing seems very obvious, but still yet, many businesses drag their feet on taking advantage.
As we have been focusing a bit more on local search and its impact on social media marketing, it seems as though this follows right along in line with the trend.
Facebook Deals is actually an incredibly intelligent move on the part of the social media dynamo.
What Is It?
For some time now, users of Facebook have had access to Facebook Places. This was already a great deal for local businesses, because when Facebook users “Checked In” at a place- a clickable link takes you directly to that Facebook page- like so:
Here, you can see that actor Kevin Machate was at Gold’s Gym. Up until the roll out of Facebook Deals, this was simply one more way users could get access to Facebook Pages of businesses they might not have otherwise seen.
With Deals, however, now, there are four types of deals that the now 200 million mobile users on Facebook will have access to: individual, friend, loyalty and charity.
These are offered by businesses utilizing the application, not Facebook itself- so you can see the benefit there. Not only can users check in, but they can also let all of their friends know when they’ve gotten a sweet deal for doing so. Brilliant.
Consider a moment the implications of mobile use, and the vast number of those users checking their phones, etc for information. Those 200 million users aren’t likely to browse sites- even if you’ve set it up for mobile, unprompted. But, they are browsing Facebook. More than that, they are using Facebook to not only talk about the products, services and events they enjoy- but now, with Facebook Deals, they are talking about it in a more direct, marketable way.
But Foursquare Already Does That
And, as such, of course, there has been speculation that Facebook Places and Deals might put a crimp in their style.
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley isn’t worried about that.
“We have always said that the check-in is going to be a commodity, Crowley said. “The check-in itself isn’t interesting; it’s what happens after the check-in that matters.”
He seems to believe that being able to claim “mayorship” via the earned badges they get for checking in certain places. I think, “Do I want to be a fictitious mayor, or do I want to save money?” From a customer standpoint- though Foursquare businesses often announce deals, many are contingent on reaching status levels. From a business standpoint- Foursquare just doesn’t have the user base that Facebook Places has. Speculation is, that Facebook Places has 30 million users- as opposed to the 4 million on Foursquare.
This is not to say that marketing on Foursquare is pointless- it isn’t, there are advantages to using this location based service in mobile marketing as well. It’s quick, and if you’re a brick and mortar business advertising- it’s a great thing. And- if you have a look at the link above, it reveals that Foursquare users do check in more often than Facebook Places users.
It is interesting to note that even though marketing to mobile is becoming a huge thing- on a huge social network, the one group that you would think would latch on firmly- hasn’t. We explored this a bit in Restaurant Owners Ignore Hard Data At Their Own Peril and it is worth considering. All those users checking in- why aren’t more cashing in on this trend?
