The social network giant Facebook has begun rolling-out Place Tips, a system that allows businesses to send updates to a others' mobile devices when they're nearby.
Originally introduced in January 2015, Facebook has been conducting a trial of the Place Tips feature in New York City, After months serving more than 100 businesses in the city, Facebook is ready to release it to all of U.S..
Keen to get retailers on board, Facebook is sending out free Bluetooth beacon (Bluetooth Low-Energy [BLE]) devices to businesses that request them. This is meant as part of Facebook's nationwide expansion of its Place Tips feature.
Place Tips is designed to help business owners to connect digitally with their customers while they are in-store. The program uses beacons to publish curated content about a business to the top of a shopper's News Feed while they're at the company's location.
Once a business sets up a beacon, it can detect when a Facebook user is within a set distance. And when a user is in its proximity, it can then send "fun, useful and relevant" information.
According to Facebook, this information could include (and not limited to) content posted by friends in the same place, as well as popular menu items and upcoming events.
What Facebook wants with Place Tips is to give shoppers more information about a business, particularly retailers.
Initially, the Place Tips is not open for advertisers. However, businesses are given the ability to write their own welcome note that appears on top of their Place Tips feed, which can be used to promote themselves.
With the many advantages Place Tips can give to both businesses and passing customers, the drawbacks are the feed is only visible to those that are within the set distance, have Bluetooth enabled, and gave Facebook permission to access their location data.
In its still-under-development project, Facebook uses its own branded beacon devices. By offering them out for free, Facebook is hoping to attract more businesses to use the feature.
Popularizing Beacons as Marketing Efforts
Since beacons have become one of the major foundations for location-based marketing efforts for businesses, one of the biggest drawbacks is the socialization for shoppers to be actively using mobile apps in order to make the communications between a business and a shopper successful.
This is where Facebook steps in. It saw this as an opportunity. Facebook's mobile app is one of the most downloaded, and with that many users, Facebook has a wide coverage and is certain that the Place Tips feature can benefit many businesses. Facebook is taking advantage of its own ubiquity.
Some people that aren't used to push information on their devices that they don't expect, might find Place Tips a bit of a spam. The social network was keen to stress out that the information sharing is just "one way".
"The beacons don't collect any information from people or their phones or change the kind of location information Facebook receives," explained Facebook.
One of the tech companies that also uses beacons is Apple. With its iBeacon, Apple is using it to promote businesses around the world. The review of the feature is positive, with restaurant chains saying that their sales have increased.
As with how beacons work, companies that provide them should be completely open about how their systems work. Turning on Bluetooth, allowing the beacon to locate users and others, are simply the ways to provide information about your whereabouts. Not everyone are into this.
Within the mobile trend and the modern Digital Age, there is a lot of paranoia. If Facebook can't be completely transparent, people would simply disable the feature.
