Looking for Facebook Deals in Australia? You’ll have to wait.
Facebook launced the Facebook Deals platform at its Facebook Mobile Event on 3 November 2010. The new feature allows businesses to offer deals to fans and visitors through pages and Facebook Places. To setup the deal the business goes through a simple interface on the business page.
Deals are broken down into four categories:
Individual: the person simply redeems the voucher (on the phone) for a free or discounted product or service. For instance call in between 4-5 pm and receive a free muffin with your coffee.
Loyalty: like the ubiquituous coffee card, this one offers the deal after a certain number of purchases or check-ins. Tenth coffee free or similar.
Friends: Facebook is all about socialising, so this was a no-brainer. This may be a deal where you check in with four friends and you all receive the deal. Great for restaurants and hospitality businesses.
Charity: Facebook is offering businesses the chance to generate a following while giving some money to a worthwhile cause. The North Face is launching a promotion where each check in at a US store will trigger a $1 donation to the National Parks Society – up to $150,000.
The deals platform is available to a select number of partners now and will be rolled out to all Facebook Pages over time. In Australia and anywhere else outside the USA, we will have to wait, no dates have been set for its launch here. Facebook Places was available in Australia within six weeks of its launch in the USA, and a similar time-frame is likely. This could see some businesses offering Facebook deals before Christmas.
Facebook Places and Single Sign On For Mobile
Facebook Places has been expanded to allow location applications such as Gowalla, Loopt and Yelp to read, write and search the locations data on Facebook (until now it was write only). This allows these applications to list your Facebook friends who have checked in nearby, and to make suggestions of other relevant locations near where you have checked in.
Single Sign On For Mobile is now live. No more fiddling around with touch screens and tiny keyboards inputting your password, if you remember it, click on the sign on with Facebook icon, allow the site to access your profile information and you are connect. The expanded Facebook Places, combined with Single Sign On for Mobile, deepens the social aspect of these applications and is sure to see a big uptake in their use.
Facebook Places combined with Facebook Deals will allow businesses to more actively target promotions to fans who are at or near the business, offering huge potential to local businesses who are yet to realise the advantage of a strong social media presence.
Facebook Places For Android
Facebook Places is now available for Android and a new Android SDK has been released with an iPhone version coming in a few days. The iPhone app has been updated to include deals.
At the Facebook Mobile Event, Mark Zuckerberg let slip that Facebook Places is now the most popular locations service on the planet. He wouldn’t give statistics or figures but he confirmed it at question time. With the integration of Single Sign On for Mobile and Facebook Deals, Facebook places looks like becoming the dominant player in the locations services space.
