WebProNews

Tag: Facebook Deals

  • Facebook Places and Check-In Deals Come to Pages

    Facebook is making changes that make it easier for businesses to manage their Facebook presence and get customers to engage.

    InsideFacebook reports that Facebook has confirmed with them that it has started bringing Facebook Places functionality (including Check-In Deals) to Facebook Pages that have street addresses. Local businesses, pay attention.

    Josh Constine says: “Facebook tells us this automatic merge of Pages and Places ‘makes things easier for Page administrators’. We agree that it is a better solution than the now removed option to manually merge Places with Pages. By expanding the number of Pages that can run Checkin Deals, Facebook may be looking to drive user awareness and engagement with the product and earn money off of it through ads promoting the incentives.”

    Local is an increasingly competitive space right now, and businesses have more and more ways to reach consumers online and through mobile devices than ever before. What will be particularly interesting to me is to see how this plays out with regards to competition with Google, which has essentially taken the place of yellow pages for many consumers.

    Facebook is certainly not new to business pages, but the increased functionality, stacked up to new and forthcoming features for Google’s Place Pages, means more direct competition as the go-to place for consumers to look up local business info, find deals, and even check in. Add to that, the fact that Bing continues to expand on its own Facebook integration and has made some big deals to greatly expand its mobile presence (via Microsoft partnerships with Nokia and RIM), and Google may end up feeling the heat from that angle as well.

    Facebook also recently rolled out Page tagging in Photos. Google is actually sending photographers out to businesses to take professional shots of interiors for inclusion on Place Pages.

  • Facebook Social Deals May Be Groupon’s “PointCast Moment”

    A new offering called Facebook Social Deals was launched in five cities today. It’s a service similar to Groupon or LivingSocial, where merchants offer highly discounted, time-sensitive deals to their customers. The product is well-integrated with the overall Facebook experience, it’s not intrusive, and it has sociality built-right-in, enabling individuals to not only buy deals, but also promote them to their networks using other familiar capabilities such as the Facebook “Like” button.

    It may be a mortal blow to Groupon, the current leader of the daily deals pack.

    The illustrative example here for Groupon may be a company from Bubble 1.0 called PointCast. PointCast was the hottest property on the dotcom block, and had been the target of a $450 million buyout offer from News Corp in 1997. PointCast, certain they were on to the Next Big Thing, spurned the offer (not unlike how Groupon rejected Google’s $6 billion offer just a few short months ago).

    Shortly after PointCast rejected the News Corp offer, it fell out of favor with customers, suitors and investors, and went into a corporate death spiral from which it never recovered. After being valued at almost half-a-billion dollars, PointCast was sold a short time later for a mere $7 million bucks.

    So, what do you think? Does Groupon have something that’s so unique and valuable that it can withstand the Facebook onslaught that was launched today? Or are they about to get slaughtered?

    Originally published on The Social Customer Manifesto

  • Facebook Social Deals Uses News Feed as Advantage over Groupon, Google, LivingSocial

    Facebook finally launched its new Social Deals feature today, but only in five cities in the U.S. Facebook had previously unveiled a Deals service based on check-ins to Facebook Places, but it’s been long expected that they would go more for the Groupon space.

    That space is getting more crowded, and many are wondering if Groupon can maintain its lead. LivingSocial is nothing to shake a stick at either, and there are plenty of smaller, deals sites aimed at specific local markets and verticals. Then there’s Google. It seems unlikely that any one company will be able to dominate here like say search or social networks.

    That said, if anyone can, you’d have to wonder if it would be the dominant search engine or the dominant social network. Both Facebook and Google have huge advantages over rivals, given their enormous user bases, and the ability to insert deals where users already are.

    Google just unveiled Google Offers last week. It will involve email just like Groupon, but Google has a lot of other weapons it could potentially use, with Place Pages, AdWords, Gmail, Latitude, etc.

     

    With Facebook Deals, users will also subscribe to emails, but they can also appear in the news feed. That’s one area where Facebook should have a huge leg up on Google and anyone else.

    Facebook is starting with Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco with the Deals space. It’s being called a “test” but there’s little doubt that this will be a full-blown product for Facebook.
    Facebook Deals in Atlanta

    Businesses are still getting used to Facebook marketing. Getting seen in the news feed is perhaps the most important part of that. This week, Facebook marketing firm Buddy Media released a report, giving brands tips for capitalizing on Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm (the basis for what Facebook shows users in their news feed).

    Deals will present a whole new option, and deals in general have already proven to be massively popular among consumers. Many Facebook users check their news feed multiple times throughout the day, which should ensure conversions, as long as the deals are attractive.

  • Is Facebook’s New “Buy with Friends” a Hint at Bigger Things to Come?

    Facebook is all about friends, so it stands to reason that friends be the main facilitators of marketing through the social network. This is a sentiment driven home by Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories, as well as another new product they’re testing called "Buy With Friends". 

    Buy With Friends, revealed by Facebook at the Social Apps Conference, is a way for Facebook users to let their friends know about virtual goods purchases they make, and a lot of the speculation regarding this product pertains to the possibility in expanding it into physical goods and services. In other words – a Groupon competitor. 

    Facebook Credits - Payments of the future?With Buy With Friends, users can unlock deals and share them with friends – encouraging other users to take advantage of the same deals. It’s not hard to see where this could be attractive to businesses in a Groupon-like sense. 

    Facebook already has Facebook Deals, which users can use to check into businesses and get deals for doing so. It’s not inconceivable that these two products could merge somewhere down the line, especially when you consider how big this space is getting (Google Offers should be appearing in the near future). 

    Keep in mind that Facebook just acquired mobile advertising company Rel8tion and is now making Facebook Credits acceptance mandatory in all Facebook apps. As the mobile payments space also heats up this year (with offerings expected from both Google and Apple, to name a couple), it would also not be surprising to see Facebook Credits become an option for paying for physical goods and services out in the real world. 

    The company is already closest to owning the Internet user’s identity (a concept being pushed by even the government now), with Facebook log-in available all over the web, my guess is that we’ll see a lot more Facebook Credit purchases around the web even sooner. 

    Let’s also keep in mind that Facebook is already in the stickers-for-businesses game. Last year, they handed out stickers to businesses for getting "liked" on Facebook. Is it that big a stretch to see them offer "Pay with Facebook" stickers?