Facebook places benefits to UK businesses

If you’re an iPhone owner, or even if you’re not, you may have noticed the recent addition of Facebook places which delivers a new location based service to popular social network. Facebook has developed the service to work similar to Gowalla and Foursquare whereby users can update their status by checking in to locations. Users can use the feature by either using the Facebook app for iPhone or visiting touch.facebook.com, Facebook is currently working on rolling out the service to Blackberry and Android.

The opportunity for businesses and users is that you can now put yourself on the map and when other users check in to nearby locations you receive a notification. Facebook says this will help people to meet up and connect in the real world as well as online. You can create new places, tag friends in locations and combine with your regular status updates.

Businesses can claim Places pages similar to fan pages. Location based information can then be merged with a business’s Facebook page. Once merged the page will included places information such as maps which shows people who have recently checked in.

In addition places can carry ads or location based promotions such as the Dominoes Pizza Foursquare campaign. In addition ad’s can be targeted to specific demographic information, likes, interests, age and gender. You can’t advertise a specific location as such but you can target specific user groups that have stated they have an interest in a certain product.

Naturally some users have been hesitant to jump head first, but some brave brands have been very proactive in utilising the new service. With the new location based service will come a flurry of location based apps to promote brands and deliver added value through the social networks. This is great news for app development agencies as now there is a wider platform for location based apps to be developed on.