One of the more recent additions to the Facebook portfolio is a service called “Places” which enables customers to ‘check-in’ to a physical business or store location. When a customer ‘checks-in’, it will appear on their Facebook newsfeed, alerting all their friends of their location.

This is a great way for generating awareness / friend recommendations of your store and its location. There’s no reason for any local business with a physical store to not be using Facebook Places to help drive more footfall through their front door and bring in more business/sales. This has been made possible largely due to the widespread popularity of GPS-location enabled devices like iPhones, iTouch and Android devices amongst Irish adults.

Checking in

This is a free service for all businesses connected with Facebook. “Places” uses the GPS location features available on most smartphones to record when a person visits a particular location.

By checking in users can let their friends know about their current location, tag friends who are with them, view comments/notes/recommendations from friends who have visited this location / business in the past. The business also receives additional location publicity as a map will appear on Facebook indicating the location of the store. 

Check-ins appear on the Facebook feeds of both those doing the checking in and their friends’ feed. As the average Facebook user has 150 friends, this feature very clearly creates the potential for instantaneous brand-visibility and publicity towards up to (on average) 150 new potential customers, at no cost to the business itself.  

Incentivising Checking In

 The key for businesses/advertisers is how to motivate potential customers to check in and translate this into bringing more customers through their doors. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the potential this feature offers. One way is to create in-store deals and promotions which reward checking in. This can be manipulated as to attract particular customers. Think about rewarding customers who check-in in groups greater than X people, or incentivising particular age groups, or a particular gender for example. You could also use Facebook Places as a form of loyalty card by rewarding customers who check in a certain number of times over a particular time frame.

 Having a Facebook page set up for your business and registering your business’ location accurately on Facebook Places are prerequisites for any successful location-based promotion strategy through Facebook. The good news is “It’s FREE” and the key is how you use it effectively. Talk to us if you would like to explore this further for your business.