Facebook Deals
Why go through all the trouble to do Facebook Places? It enables you to make Facebook Deals. These coupons can help bring customers your way—and bring them back, too.
Facebook Deals come in these four varieties:
• Individual Deals: These are essentially standard-issue coupons. You post the deal on your Facebook Places page, and if a user is interested in the deal, he buys it and uses it when he’s ready.
• Loyalty Deals: These deals reward customers based on the number of times they check in to your Facebook Places page. For example, you might offer customers a 5 percent discount on the fifth time they check in.
• Friend Deals: These give customers a gift for getting their friends to check in, too. For example, you might offer a customer a free meal if she checks in with five friends.
• Charity Deals: These deals provide incentives for the customer to spend money by offering to donate money to various charities. For example, you might donate $5 to the local school district for every $50 a customer spends.
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For Loyalty Deals, Facebook limits the minimum number if check-ins to two and the maximum to 20. In other words, you can’t make a deal that rewards someone for checking in once, or a deal that requires more than 20 check-ins.
Setting Up a Deal
When you’re ready to make a deal, head to your Facebook Places page; if it’s already integrated with your Facebook business page, you can access it directly from that page. Then follow these steps on the screen that appears (see Figure 18.5):
Figure 18.5: Setting up your Facebook Deals.
1. Click Deal. Facebook prompts you to make the following selections:
2. Click the button next to the type of deal (Individual, Friend, Loyalty, or Charity) you want to run.
3. Define your offer by adding a brief summary of the deal (limited to 50 characters) in the Deal Summary window and instructions for claiming the deal (limited to 100 characters) in the How to Claim window. Try to be as specific as possible when describing how to claim the deal. For instance, you could have a customer claim a deal by showing his phone to you, by printing out the coupon beforehand, or by saying a particular code. Being clear here will save you from a lot of potential trouble later.
4. Choose a Starting and Ending date and time using the drop-down menus.
5. Limit the number of claims by clicking the button next to Deal will end after [number] claims and adding a number; if you don’t want to limit the number of claims, click the button next to Unlimited. Make the number too small and you don’t know if you could have had a more successful campaign. Make it too large or, for that matter, unlimited, and you could run yourself out of business.
6. Limit the number of claims per user to once or once every 24 hours by clicking the relevant button. Murphy’s Law dictates that people will try to take advantage of your coupons, so this is your chance to limit their activity.
After you choose from one of the four types of deals, you have to describe it in 50 words or less. Try to be brief but specific.
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Certain coupon elements can be modified later, but it’s always best to have your plan set before announcing the coupon.
Promoting Your Deal
The real work of issuing a coupon begins when you start promoting it. Ideally, you want a few key influencers to catch wind of the coupon and share it with all their similarly influential friends.
Facebook does make promoting your coupon easier than, say, advertising in a newspaper. Here are some options:
• Share it via a Facebook status update
• Create a viral video for the sale
• Contact influential bloggers
• Advertise the sale at your place of business
Great Ideas for Deals
The sky’s the limit when it comes to deals through Facebook. Here are some suggestions for executable deals.
• Give a discount for customers who Like your Facebook page.
• Give customers who mention your product on their News Feed exclusive access to a special Facebook sale.
• Use a funny, obscure holiday relevant to your product as a theme for your sale. For instance, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, you can have a nautical-themed sale.
• Give a special item to the person who checks in the most during the course of a week.
The Least You Need to Know
• Facebook is more supportive than ever of local businesses.
• Facebook Places and Facebook Deals provide check-in services and mass coupons that can be used as free advertising and to attract new customers.
• If you establish your business on Facebook Places, then people can check in to your venue and use your online deals.
• There are four types of Facebook Deals: Individual, Loyalty, Friend, and Charity.
• You can set the parameters for Facebook Deals, from the length of time to the number of coupons for sale.