John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing offers “5 reasons why businesses should use Facebook Places.”  He suggests:

• Facebook is building a suite of advertising tools that will allow you to list, claim and advertise your place on Facebook
• You no longer have to educate your customers – they all know what Facebook is
• People checking in at your business are naturally telling some part of the word about your business
• Offering coupons and special offers for people who check in is a natural way to tap the power of using online tools to drive offline sales.
• Data that you can collect on users and amount of times they checkin will prove extremely valuable in tracking customers and advertising spend

Read John’s full article here.

Now I’m a Foursquare finatic, so I’m not sure I will convert to Places or try to integrate the two location-based services into my social media strategy (but see this about 4sq integration plans).  I don’t play Foursquare (4sq) for the social gaming aspect (Facebook’s Places is not a game; only a networking tool) – except I’m curious how businesses will learn to reward extreme loyalty to those who are “mayors” of their place of business.  I mean, if there’s someone out there who is so fixated on returning over and over to your business, AND willing to socialize their loyalty to their friends on Foursquare, that’s a referral marketing dream – why wouldn’t you reward them with a coupon, a free this-or-that, or some reasonable acknowledgment.  By the way, here’s a reasonable argument on how Foursquare can beat our Facebook Places.

The one thing that intrigues me about Places is that there is ALOT of people doing it.  Foursquare has its adopters but it is far from mainstream.  Even the integrated gaming into Facebook annoys folks (“who cares if you checked-in?”!) because it imports graphical icons that look alot like Farmville which alot of people do, but it also annoys more of us!  But so many people are checking in on Places – perhaps some of the same people who earlier yelled at me, “who cares if you checked-in?”  Perhaps since it’s Facebook, it’s more tolerable in your news feed.

So the second bullet is most intriguing to me – Foursquare requires education.  Facebook doesn’t. The process of checking in somewhere is not complex on Foursquare OR Facebook Places – but people have an affinity for Facebook and they assume it is easier because it’s within the same Facebook culture.  Getting people to download another mobile app and then teaching them all the 4sq badges, etc….well, I can see how Places might take the place of Foursquare.

However, 4sq still has 4 million users which is maybe more than any other location-based service.  And as a result of the news of the launching of Facebook Places, did you hear that Foursquare had a record number of NEW subscribers?

OK – first of all I haven’t checked-in anywhere yet!

But I plan on it.

I have been using Foursquare for a while now and Donny has been using Gowalla.  Competiting location-based services (LBS), we decided we could divide and conquer and compare the two major LBS giants (there are plenty of other sites, not to mention Yelp).  There are others out there as well, but these are the ones we wanted to play with.

• If LBS is new to you, here’s a Wiki page about it (make sure you got your coffee first!)
• Here’s several articles about Foursquare that could help explain its advantages
• Here’s a forum on Gowalla’s site that (obviously biased, but they make their case why they are better)

Now Facebook Places is announced yesterday.  Rather than writing my own review (since I really haven’t experimented enough with it), here’s a good one from TechCrunch.

A couple of surprises:

• It’s only available in the U.S. – really?  I know they will roll it out internationally, but Foursquare did a huge deal with the recent World Cup in South Africa – why roll out something in a global social media economy that is only available in one country?  I think I would have waited.
• I also hear that it is not available everywhere in the U.S. yet.  Same question as before.  Really?
• Why call it “Places” when Google just recently announced their new “Pages” feature which is more geared toward local search?  Confusing.

I’ve got alot of ideas on how these LBS tools can be used by businesses and even churches to reward loyalty and encouraging social word-of-mouth (aka, “word-of-phone”).  This article from the NYTimes also highlights how Places will be used to compete with Google for advertising space (although I really don’t pay attention much to Facebook advertising now).  I’ll be curious if Facebook Places offers something special that taps into their overwhelming dominance in the social networking world.  Alot of research still to do.  But know that we’re looking into it for you!

-Randy

This morning, I’m sharing a few quick links to highlight some real practical articles on various social media tools:

Twitter: Scott Williams claims that while MySpace was once the thing, then Facebook, for him, Twitter is the best tool in his arsenal.

Foursquare (4sq): Still relatively new on the scene, Brian Solis describes Foursquare as “social currency” – if location-marketing doesn’t make sense to you, read even more about Foursquare here.

Facebook: If you’re a nonprofit, watch this video on harnessing the power of Facebook for raising money and awareness (this is no guarantee of your own future results!)

Blog: Here are 14 tactics to help you get the word out about your new business blog.

This is some great information Donny posted in an email yesterday to some of our Facebook Page clients.  I wanted to share excerpts here as well:

———–

I wanted to take a moment to address the recent Facebook announcement that came out which is causing some confusion and stirring with fan page owners.  Here’s the announcement if you’ve not see it:

Preview Your New Page Layout
To make your Page easier to browse, we’re simplifying a couple things: 1. Boxes are going away (including the Boxes tab); 2. All custom tabs will be narrower (520 pixels). This is your chance to preview your Page and make edits as needed before the new layout goes public on August 23. Read full announcement

So what does that mean for your new custom fan page?  Here’s our take:

1) Boxes going away: This was new news to us.  However, this only impacts a small number of you who have added these to your fan page.  These are the small images that are located underneath the “People Like This” section which can be found under your new custom profile image.  We have these images on our Facebook Page as well.  There’s some talk that while the images might “go away”, they may also be placed in another location after August 23rd.  Several fan page owners (beyond The Marketing Twins) are very upset about losing these linkable images.  Facebook will sometimes listen to that feedback so we would not be surprised to see a change there.  Until then, we have to assume they will go away… which is a bummer to us.  If you want those graphics added back to another tab that will remain, contact us and we can work out a nominal fee to make that change for you.

2) Narrower custom tab (520 px): Ok, let’s keep it simple: if we created the graphic images for your fan page, there’s nothing to worry about.  We’ve actually known about this change since April/May so any fan pages we’ve worked on since then were created using graphics that fit the 520 pixel wide format.  If we created the graphics for you, again, you have nothing to worry about.  If for some reason there’s something wrong with your page graphics after the change, we’ll adjust those but we don’t think that will be a problem since they were all done at 520 pixels to begin with.

3) Preview your Page: I would suggest all of you take a look at your page throughout next week as supposedly that’s when the preview will occur.  Note that this announcement has continually been pushed back (originally planned for early July) so who knows when the change will actually occur and when the actual preview will be available.  However, since FB has been communicating nicely to all of us recently on this change, we expect the same notification once the complete preview is available.

I hope that addresses some concerns, fears or confusion you might have been experiencing with this announcement.   Thanks!!

Donny