Facebook Places

What is it?

Facebook Places was released in Ireland this week. Places brings location based services to the worlds largest social network, allowing people to use the GPS on their phones to "check-in" to their location and tag other facebook friends who are there with them.

Privacy

As with most facebook applications these days the feature does raise some privacy issues. Mister Zuckerberg says that the service is not about broadcasting your location to the world; it's about discovering and sharing new places with your friends. Your check-in is posted to your wall however, and you can tag any of your friends without asking their permission - not the greatest idea if you've gone for a sneaky few with work colleagues. This setting can be changed in your privacy settings under "Customise Settings" and the “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in.” section.

What it means to advertisers

Places is an exciting development for us advertising folk. For the last few years Foursquare and Gowalla have been pushing location based social media services, but take-up has come mainly from early adopters and not the public at large. By introducing location to facebook's huge user base location based social media will enter the mainstream and it's popularity will explode.

Brands can begin to offer rewards for check-ins. Some possible uses:

Coffee shops could use places as a loyalty scheme and offer a free coffee to anyone who checks-in 10 times. (They'll save money and the environment by not printing loyalty cards too)

Retailers could offer discounts to customers who check-in.

Group buying schemes could be encouraged by offering group discounts for checking in to a store with your friends.

Music stores could offer iTunes previews and downloads to customers while they're in the store. If the store was big enough they could provide bespoke content based on where they check-in i.e gaming information for anyone who checks in in the games section, and music to those in the music section.

As you can see the possibilities are there, now it's time to take advantage of them.