How Will Facebook Place Tips Affect You and Your Customers?

Social media today is constantly changing and pushing the boundaries of what we can experience within each platform as users. Recently, Facebook rolled out a new feature called Facebook Place Tips. This new feature allows updates about places near you to show up at the top of your mobile newsfeed based on your current location. Then, if you would like to see more information about this place, you can simply select the update to expand it.

When you expand the update, you will not only see recent posts and photos from the business’ Facebook page, but you will also see if your friends have posted about this place or reviewed the business. With the credibility of recommendations from friends still being so high, this seems to be a smart move by Facebook. In fact, According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all other forms of advertising. With this understanding, Facebook's move to combine these two types of referrals (based on a user’s location and their friend list) seems appropriate.

How Will Facebook Place Tips Work?

In order to use this feature you will first have to allow Facebook location tracking. Once this is allowed and you have the most updated version of the mobile app, you will start to see Facebook Place Tips for the select locations that are enabled right now. For now, most of those places reside in New York City, but the feature is likely to expand to many new locations in the near future. You can turn the Facebook Place tips notification on and off at any time from within the app. Also, viewing the Place Tips within your Facebook app will not show others what you have viewed or where you are located.

Your location is determined by using cellular networks, Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth beacons (also called iBeacons). If you’re not familiar with Bluetooth beacons, you can learn more about them here, but they’re basically a technology that allows for highly localized messaging to be sent to people through their smartphone. A location using an iBeacon can send a signal to your phone, and if Place Tips is turned on, it will help Facebook determine your location and show you more relevant tips and places at the right time. (Marketers, does this sound familiar?)

Facebook has taken other social experiences and integrated them within their platform successfully in the past. Take, for instance, the significant increase in video shares within Facebook. According to a January 2015 study from AdvertisingAge, “People around the world are posting 75% more videos to Facebook than they did a year ago.” Could Place Tips become the best way to review and decide on which places to visit in a new city? Well, that’s yet to be seen, but it is possible.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Facebook has not made any statements about monetizing Place Tips, which is great news for marketers. Keep in mind that they recently announced that they will be reducing the amount of misleading content that people see in their news feed. This is a great time to make sure you are following best practices and providing value to your followers and those contacts that may be in the area who could soon find you through Facebook Place Tips.

As social media platforms change, the key aspect to grasp is agility. Be sure to revisit your content with this new rollout in mind and continuously be thinking about the best way to provide the most value to both your existing audience and all those other new contacts. If you are interested in revamping your social media strategy, feel free to schedule a consult with one of our Marketing Specialists. In the meantime, if you have any social media strategy questions, please post them in the comments below.

Image credit: Facebook