Categories
Facebook - Places
Facebook launches location-based app, but is it any use to brands?
Do you remember just a few short years ago when no one cared where their friends were and the only thing people checked into were hotels? What a dull, dull world we lived in.
Now, of course, the smart set are all brandishing smartphones bursting with various location-based apps and merrily checking in to anything that casts a shadow. Much better.
Earlier this year, we covered some of the key players fighting it out to become top dog in the location-based app war, and yesterday a cheeky new upstart entered the fray which we think will be worth keeping an eye on. If you're already one of their 500m+ global users, you may have heard of them.
Facebook Places is poised to take check-in culture mainstream, positioning itself as a facility to share where you are and find nearby friends. Of course, the latter feature may cause a few people to revist the collection of school acquaintances, stalkers and ex-lovers they currently call 'friends'...
Although currently limited to users in the US with mobile access to touch.facebook.com or the iPhone app, the Facebook website promises Places will be rolled out more broadly at an unspecified point 'in the future'.
Brands will inevitably be keen to leverage this new development but, while it's possible to 'claim' a place owned by a business, it's not possible to use the system to target ads at people who have checked into a specific place. The Places for Advertisers FAQs states that the current benefit is to use Places as a simple promotion tool: 'By giving your potential customers the ability to check in at your business, you give them the power to tell their friends about your business'. Any business with an official Facebook page will be able to merge it with their Place, again at some time in the future.
While this is probably less functionality than most advertisers would have hoped for, it's not to be underestimated. Facebook's existing engagement ads, which allow people to interact through comments, polls and the unbiquitous 'like' button, have already proved hugely successful. Speaking at a recent event at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, Facebook's UK commercial director Stephen Haines gave details of how social ads, i.e. 'an ad that has [your friends] names in it', increased ad recall by 68%, while also raising puchase intent by a factor of four.
Once they've claimed their official 'places', brands will be left waiting to see how keen Facebook's users are to adopt what many see as an erosion of privacy.
Let us know what you think. Is it farewell to Foursquare? Or will the world baulk at Facebook encroaching this far into their lives?
