Over the last few months, Facebook has been striving hard to ring in more business-friendly changes. Yesterday, it launched another game changer feature called “Facebook Deals” which can help your business by encouraging Facebook users to check-in at your location.As is the case with any new feature, most businesses are asking what’s the big deal about “Facebook Deals” – how will it help my business? I personally believe that it’s a great feature which will help businesses of all sizes. And why do I believe that? Let me walk you through my reasoning.What is Facebook Deals?Facebook Deals is a new feature which allows local businesses to offer deals to users when they check in to their place on Facebook. For those who are unaware, Facebook Places lets users share where they are with their friends and see who's nearby.Now with Deals, users also can see what offers are nearby and share those deals with their friends.From a user’s perspective, finding deals is a piece of cake. They simply need to launch the Facebook for iPhone app, touch “Places” and then touch “Check In”. Places with deals are listed as yellow icons. User can then touch the place of interest (your business location) to view the deal and check in to claim it. Once these users arrive at your business location, they need to show their phone to the cashier to get their gift or redeem the applicable discount.What kind of deals can your business offer?Your business can leverage Facebook Deals feature to launch a variety of deals ranging from individual deals for a discount, free merchandise or other reward; friend deals where users and their friends claim an offer together; loyalty deals for being a frequent visitor to your business location; and charity deals where your business pledge to donate to a cause when a user checks in.One quick look at the list of businesses who’ve already signed up for Facebook Deals should be enough to convince most business owners that this feature is here to stay and will help them boost their business. Those who’ve already signed up include big names such as Starbucks, McDonald’s, Macy’s, Chitpole and several others.How does Facebook Deals help your business?Now that you know what Facebook Deals is and how your business can use it, it is no rocket science to understand how it will help your business. For a start, it helps build brand loyalty amongst customers. Every time your customer visits your business, you reward them with a gift/ discount (Loyalty Deal) along with good products/ services thereby ensuring that they never even have to think about approaching a competitor or seek an alternative.Secondly, Facebook helps spread the world about your business through social distribution.As they check-in and redeem deals, this information gets published on their Facebook profiles thereby bringing passive publicity to your business.Third, it provides more indirect advantages such as the ability to turn your business’ e-mail list into a deal distributor. You can reward customers who’ve provided their email address by sending them additional offers/ discounts.Creating a deal is easy and quick. For details, check out this Facebook video.Clearly, the opportunities offered by Facebook Deals are endless. Do you plan to use it for your business? If so, how do you plan to leverage it? Is your business using any alternatives similar to Facebook Deals? Please share your experiences by leaving a comment below this post.
