What are the Implications of Facebook Places for Your Business?

Aug. 24, 2010

Location-based social services are one of the hottest trends in social networking for the moment and have had a significant effect on how marketers use social media to reach their target audiences. Well, social network behemoth Facebook has finally joined in the fray with the recent launch of their newest feature, Facebook Places. The service, which is meant to be comparable with other location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, allows users to check in to offline locations to alert their friends to their location. The feature is currently available via iPhone as well as Facebook’s HTML5 mobile site.

How is Facebook Places different from other location-based services?

While Facebook Places sounds a lot like other services available today (Gowalla, Foursquare and Yelp to name a few) there are some fundamental differences that experts in the marketing field are predicting will have a significant impact on many businesses’ use of the service.

According to B.L Ochman, a popular social media blogger, one of the biggest differences is that Facebook users tend to provide far more personal details on their accounts including photos, relationships and employment (unlike other location-based services) and that this will cause some definite complications.

One of the largest of these complications will be that while other services of this nature allow you to check into offline locations, with Facebook Places your friends can check you in. This poses potential issues for every person who doesn’t want the entire Facebook user population (some 500 million people) to know their exact geographical location at any given time. This, coupled with Facebook’s prior privacy issues, makes some experts question the service’s safety for users and business alike.

Why should you care?

For marketers this is a clear sign of the continuing (and growing) popularity of location-based services, which has already been indicated by the fact that Foursquare, one of the most popular services in the market today, had its number of users soar from 1 million at the end of March to 1.8 million as of mid-August (from BNET).

This is also proof of the increasing importance of understanding how your target audience uses social media and how you can use that information to grow your audience’s engagement with your brand. Location-based services are the “next big thing” and staying on top of current trends is one of the most essential aspects of social media strategy since social media success tends to be, by its own nature, driven by user preferences.

One of the biggest aspects of these services that help to make them popular, and will most likely give them significant staying power is the fact that they mesh social media functionality with gaming. Participating in check-ins is useful (people often receive free coupons on offers when the participate), but it also fun. This makes these kind of services ideal for event and last minutes campaigns for many businesses and helps companies to engage with their audience on a whole new level.