Facebook has recently announced a new location based service, “Facebook Places” that allows facebook users to utilize the service within the facebook social network through mobile devices. It makes users to share where they are, find out where their friends have checked in, discover interesting places nearby and tag friends who are at the location with them as well. The main objective is to take the virtual relationships that we have recreated with old friends on facebook and bring them into the physical world.
What It Is?
We, the users of facebook are already sharing our regular activities, interests and experiences each other. And now, its new feature “Facebook Places” provides us to make avail of the ability to share the location with friends in the form of a “check-in” that appears in friends’ news feed as a status update.
How it works?
When you would like to let your online friends know your current location, you just “check in” and select from a list of places nearby. You can also able to see if any facebook users have checked in nearby – even if they are not a friend of yours online. It is very similar to tagging friends in photos. Anyone who has checked in may “tag” friends that they are with. Likewise, If your friends tags you at a place, and you have clicked “Allow” then it is as you yourself had checked in.
How “Facebook Places” Applicable for Marketers & Businesses?
There are huge valuable benefits of facebook places in case of Marketing and business.
- A user can checks in to your establishment at any time that gets published to their friends’ news feeds; which means free, organic impressions for your business, its location, who has been there. You pay nothing.
- In business world, it might give the business people an option about their business in the area – and might enable them to entice into their businesses with a coupon or some other promotion.
- For companies which covers physical location it makes sense to have a Facebook Place in order to track the people who are stopping by your store, office, or venue.
- Face book has also made places available to developers through Graph Art; this will give developers an option for integrating location features into mobile applications, websites, and applications on Facebook.
This is an excellent way to have your own business shown up within facebook places.
Apple Iphone has quickly reacted to integrate this new feature by integrating this option in its devices. This will give iphone users an additional facility to use face book places. As a first step, this new feature is enable only in United States and will be extended rest of the world in near future. Alternatively users can make use of this new feature through www.touch.facebook.com. Facebook partners Gowalla, Yelp, Foursquare, Booyah have expressed their interest of integrating Facebook places into their products. Facebook suggests developers to ensure privacy when user sharing their location information. For users to use the new feature of facebook places they need to install an application that will enable them to access facebook places.
This is a very exciting development and in future, we could see this functionality enabled to rest of the world. Its is of no doubt that it will give facebook competitors to look for better functionality than facebook places. Any how social networking users in the world can see new products like this will be rolled out to get connected with their loved ones.
Disclaimer: The post is completely based on individual thoughts and SEO Services Group bears no responsibilities for the thoughts reflected in the post.
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