Beyond the realm of common sense: Facebook Combining Location & Social Networking?

With 450 million users, and about a million new users added daily, the move into location-based functionality for the social networking giant Facebook will be significant. Expected to launch this month, May of 2010, Ad Age reports that McDonald’s is already building their Facebook page for these location-based marketing capabilities. It’s quite astounding, if you think about it. This allows brands to turn their physical locations into virtual media channels, connected to hoards of peeps across the Facebook social graph.

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In essence, this becomes the new mode of advertising, with traditional advertising via mass-media channels sinking even lower on the totem pole of effectiveness and reach. And most interestingly, especially for a local firm such as Social Media Beast serving local small businesses, this geolocation capability can trump other forms of marketing especially for local business who are more interested in grabbing foot traffic than broadcasting their promotions and products. Similar to the way some local businesses are catering to their Foursquare “mayors”, the Facebook location-based opportunity goes there and beyond, with numbers that dwarf the activity of the current location-based platforms.

Of course, this all depends on the mobile device. Here’s a fun Qualcomm video, giving the low-down on the growth there, to further validate the potential success for Facebook as they move into the mobile marketing space. Social media marketing and social media strategy will continue to shoot off tentacles like this one, to be sure. It’s a fascinating journey to be working in this field and living with and through it as it morphs and grows. I hope to be a resource for many of you, as well.

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Posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 1:25 pm in Uncategorized | RSS feed | Respond | Trackback URL