Setting the scene:
Facebook Places was announced yesterday and saw Facebook make their long awaited first steps into geolocation, an area currently dominated by Foursquare and Gowalla. These location based social apps are becoming more popular amongst business and marketers as a way to target people at specific locations, for example checking in at a Starbucks to earn rewards and free coffee. They have huge potential for campaigns, but are currently hindered by relatively small user numbers; they rely mainly on early adopters and have yet to really penetrate the lives of the average social network user.
Why is Facebook significant?
Facebook becoming a player in this game is significant because of the sheer scale of their membership. They already have the audience; they just need to bring the geolocation option into their Facebook experience.
Mobile:
Though Facebook can be accessed as standard via mobile, currently Facebook Places is only available iPhones, or geolocation enabled smart phones from the Facebook Touch mobile site. Currently there is no app available for android or blackberry devices, though they are planned at some stage.
Availability:
Places is only available in the US at the moment and no dates have been released for an international launch.
How does it work:
For the average user, Places will become an option whereby you ‘allow’ Facebook to know your location. Then you will be able to share this with your friends, find out where they are, and discover places nearby. You can add new places when you visit them, and tag yourself and your friends at locations much like you can currently do with photographs and video, and just like the current tagging options, you don’t need permission to tag your friends at locations, this has raised privacy issues already.
Your check-ins will automatically appear in your profile, in your friend’s news stream, and the news stream of your current ‘Place’. These can all be modified in your privacy settings much like everything else you can currently share on Facebook.
Clients:
Clients will be able to ‘claim’ their business’ on Places. Whether they’ve been added by themselves or someone else, owners will be able to claim ownership and automatically set up a Facebook business page which will then house and stream all the check-ins people make from their business. So essentially your local coffee house will have its own page acting as a live message board broadcasting customer check-ins.
Development:
Facebook will be making a Places API available to developers to scrape information from public places, and information users allow to be shared, so there should be an oncoming influx of interesting location based apps and games for Facebook users that will seek to take advantage of this new feature, Gowalla and Foursquare have been given access to Places, so checkins can be posted across both networks.
In practice:
Facebook as a platform for marketing becomes even more powerful with Places. Users opting to share their location become open to very focussed and direct marketing opportunities, and there is also the ‘game’ element of geolocation, earning rewards for checkins, following ‘treasure hunts’ around cities, finding out about exclusive and secret locations and so on. These are all ways companies are already using Gowalla and Foursquare to market to customers, with the 500million+ users Facebook currently boasts, the scope for these campaigns becomes even greater and the potential all the more interesting and exciting.
John Barton, Head of Planning and Social Media
