Facebook Places - Launched in the US on Wednesday
On Wednesday, Facebook launched their much awaited location service ‘Facebook Places’.
The service is simple – with none of the game-based functionality that the likes of Gowalla and Foursquare have had to develop to entice people to get involved. Both people and businesses can create locations (e.g. ‘John’s House’ or ‘The Corner Coffee Shop’) and when people arrive within the vicinity of these places they can ‘check in’ to them. A ‘check in’ generates a post on the person’s wall, on the news streams of that person’s friends and on the activity feed of that ‘place’. Because there’s no ‘competitive’ element to Facebook’s offering, they’ve also offered the functionality to tag other people in the location if they’re there with them and ‘check them in’ too.
From a user’s point of view, the main benefit of the new functionality is meeting up with friends when they’re out and about. ‘Checking In’ will give users a list of their Facebook friends who are ‘Here Now’. They can also view other Facebook users who have ‘checked-in’ to the place, and the stream of activity connected to that place – not only check ins but comments from previous ‘Places’ users which may be a useful source of feedback and tips.
As we’ve mentioned before, Facebook, with it’s 500m users worldwide and 26m users in the UK has the ability to make location mainstream. And as almost 1/3 of those global users access Facebook via their mobiles, it seems that there is a mass potential audience poised to adopt the service.
At present the service is only available in the US , accessible either on iPhones or via mobile browsers but as the system rolls out internationally in the next few months, we’d encourage premium and luxury businesses to ‘claim’ their bricks and mortar presences. It will give you more control and lessen the risks of other people, albeit with the best intentions, claiming it for you.
Once your place is claimed, you need do nothing other than monitor what’s going on as early adopters of this new functionality will do all the hard work for you – checking in, commenting etc. It will be an excellent way to understand how people feel about your ‘Place’ and identifying who your true advocates are. And it’s a great way for messages about your bricks and mortar business to spread virally over the web – either to the friends of people who have checked in, or by those who have checked in reading and contributing to your activity feed.
But things really start to get interesting once the advertising options are rolled out by Facebook. Imagine integration with your CRM and being able to target personalised offers for fans and their friends when they check in to your store, or even when they check in to somewhere in the vicinity of your store? And who better to invite to special instore events than those already checking in at that location?
The rest of the world will be watching developments in the US with interest to see if the service takes off. But if anyone has the power to make location based marketing go mainstream, it’s Facebook.
