Facebook Places – for Advertisers
August 23rd, 2010
Cool new mobile Geo-Location application by Facebook just went live the other night. It’s called Facebook Places. Places allows you to create a place for your business. The hope would be that when one of your customers arrives, they will post about where they are, giving your “Place” some exposure.
For the average person, this is a fun application that will allow users to see if any other friends are at the same location or alert their friends to their location.
For advertisers, this is similar to other “check in” applications. The Places application will pop up when someone posts about your place. Included is a link to your Facebook page where you of course have information on your products or services and contact information, hours of operation and what have you.
It will have a word of mouth effect in that the customers who use it will let their friends know where they’ve been through it. Hopefully it will always be positive, but you know how that goes. It’ll likely have it’s share of negative feedback. I can just see it “I’m at {insert Place} and they have the worst service tonight!” Not great, but I am sure there will be plenty of the positive variety as well.
Information on implementing and using the app can be found on Facebook’s Help Page.
This is of course the buzz of many social media blogs. A couple that have a good review are: TechCrunch and Mashable.
The The Facebook Blog also has a discussion going, with some helpful tips.
FoxBusiness has a video that explains it all for ya. Check it out:
In the end, this will just be one more small step in the social media mix, but when it comes to free advertising, every little bit counts, right?
