Locating Business Marketing Opportunities in 2010 with Facebook Places

Facebook has long been the virtual hub that allows people find each other and connect. Now, an interesting new Facebook option allows users to also find each other at physical locations. As more people in the Facebook community are beginning to use this new feature, businesses are exploring how it can be useful as a social media marketing tool.

If you’re an avid Facebook user, you probably share photos, clever comments, and status updates reporting interesting (and maybe not so interesting) details about your life. If you are doing all of this with your iPhone, you may have also discovered one of the newest ways to share what you’re up to – Facebook Places. Now you can not only post that you desperately need caffeine, you can also “check in” to let your friends know when you get to Starbucks. You can tag friends who are with you, or find out if other friends are already there, as well. The Facebook Blog post Who, What, When, and Now…Where provides more details about how it all works.

So what can this feature do for social media marketing? Think about the customer testimonial as a powerful tool in business promotion. For example, a man hearing that a friend regularly dines at Alice’s Restaurant is likely to be motivated to try it for himself the next time he wants to dine out. Now imagine that same guy is trying to decide where to have dinner, and discovers through Facebook Places that many of his friends are currently dining Alice’s Restaurant. Suddenly he is not only getting a motivating recommendation, he is getting it at just the time he is compelled to act on it, plus he has the added incentive of meeting friends there.

For the many businesses using social media marketing, Facebook Places fits right into the mix, and is proving to be especially effective for creating incentive based traffic building campaigns, as well as other types of promotions. According to an article, Marketing Experiments Emerge Using Facebook Places from the website Inside Facebook, creative marketing opportunities abound with this new facet of Facebook.

While Facebook Places is not the first location-based service to be offered, integration of this capability with the Facebook universe brings up exciting potential for expanded reach and coordinated social media campaigns using Facebook Pages for businesses.