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What are the trends and memes in social media at the moment? What’s hot off the server? One of the biggest discussions is around Facebook Places, and the future of location services, widely tipped to join the top table of social media.
Figure 1: Topic cloud for the launch of Facebook Places – 19/8 to 25/8
Here are a couple few pointers to help you to keep up with the location conversation from a brand perspective.
Top 5 Ways Big Brands are Using Foursquare
Matt Silverman on Mashable (24/8) looks at on the way brands are working to connect location services to their wider online footprint. Silverman points out ‘many predict that when cultural acceptance, mainstream social integration, and business value finally coincide, location sharing will be as common and natural as updating your Facebook status’. If so, will your brand be ready?
Location is Now Part of the Social Graph — 3 Implications
Irfan Kamal on Ogilvy PR’s 360 Digital Blog (25/8) posts his comments on the implications of exponential growth in location for marketers, agencies and social location start-ups.
Irina Slutsky on Advertising Age (18/8) offers tips on how marketers with physical locations can benefit from Places. Facebook has not yet released details on advertising opportunities.
Do believe the hype. Facebook has unveiled Places, its location-based apps service. Mashable (19/8) has described it as ‘fascinating’. Initial users will need an iPhone or log onto the networking behemoth’s smartphone site. Android and Blackberry users haven’t been overlooked and will soon be able to use the service.
Places uses GPS on smartphones and users can check-in to find places, share where you are or find your Places friends. Friends can also tag your whereabouts. Facebook has pinned its strategy on the idea that after home and work the third area of our lives we talk about a lot is where we’ve been or going.
Privacy will be controlled by the user and details only seen by friends. But one of the trending articles on Tweetmeme yesterday was advice from Gawker.com (19/8) on the downsides of being tagged, which although can be deleted, can cause all kinds of mayhem if you haven’t chosen to check-in yourself. The site recommends avoiding the function all together.
So, what’s the potential of Places and peer location services for your brand in terms of engagement and promotion? Well here’s a bit of a heads up for any businesses planning a location-based marketing campaign. There’s been a real surge in mobile users accessing such services, which has helped create a tailored customer pool for brands to engage at the point of purchase. There are 150 million Facebook followers using a mobile to access the networking site.
One of wider questions has been whether Facebook’s foray into location has sounded the death-knoll for pioneers such as Foursquare. TechCrunch (17/8) acknowledged that Facebook would no doubt be a competitor.
But, it suggested the real Achilles heel for all location players will be if the social networking site directly partners venues on loyalty deals and promotions. This could hit the revenues beyond the incumbents – and even ripple as far as Yelp and Google.
