Online Marketing Blog from Radical

It is here, well almost anyway. Last night Facebook launched their plans for their location based service called ‘places’.  You will be able to ‘check in’ to businesses and other locations much like foursquare so that your friends will be able to see where you are at that time. You will also be able to add locations (such as your own house) and tag friends who are there with you.

Unfortunately the service is not launched over here yet. Facebook has said they hope to launch in the U.S in the next few days so when can we expect the feature over here? I had a look around online and there are no confirmed rumours of an official launch here in Europe so I guess we will just have to sit it out. Also only those mobile users with an iPhone will be able to use the service for now.

A great tweet as seen on another digital blog read “What do you get when you combine Foursquare with Facebook? Facebook.” I myself do have a foursquare account but I will admit to never actually ‘checking in’. With a Twitter account, Facebook account, numerous email accounts and some real life friends too I felt another account would be a bit cumbersome. However Facebook are slowly answering the call from the future for integration of all of these services. With a location based service within Facebook, I can see users who have never even heard of foursquare adopting this service quite quickly.

Where does this leave Foursquare, Yelp and other location based services? Current Foursquare users are unlikely to use both. The proposed Facebook service does allow you to pull your ‘check in’ through to Facebook but why bother when you can just do it all on Facebook. The real issue comes down to whether Facebook will make it both easy and safe to use.

Privacy of course has been heralded as an issue as Facebook have been put through the grinder recently. Check ins will appear by default on your profile and in the news feed for that place. Your friends can, by default, check you in without your explicit approval or permission. There are settings to customize all of this but it will all mainly appear in the ‘customize settings’ on your privacy page. Perhaps this should have been all made available when you first open new ‘places’ page to avoid the inevitable confusion.

So what does this mean for social media marketers? We can expect more innovation in campaigns, similar to the Dominos campaign mentioned by Kevin in his recent Foursquare post. Businesses have been crying out for this service for a long time and now that it is here it will have to be utilised correctly. There are great opportunities for developers as businesses can claim ownership of a particular location if it is their site. There will also be great prospects for the integration of offline and online campaigns as locations are made available.

This is the type of service that Facebook will need to continue to release in order to defy its critics that say its day in the sun cannot last. With over 500 million members worldwide, (we can now pinpoint these!) it is only a matter of time before Facebook release their business model for ‘places’ that will no doubt have some form of advertising. In my opinion the only direction Facebook is heading is up. So what do you think? Would you use this service? Would you forgo using Facebook for Foursqaure? Let us know your thoughts.