Facebook: We’re Committed to Deals

With Facebook Places shifting from mobile-only to a cross-device location-tagging feature, what exactly is the deal with the social giant’s Check-In Deals? Same as it ever was, the Palo Alto, CA-based firm said.

“We’re committed to deals,” Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson, told ClickZ on Wednesday. “We’re committed to check-in deals.”

Facebook blogged a privacy announcement on Tuesday that mentioned changes to the way users mark their locations. Since then, some pundits have wrongly speculated that the social giant was quitting the location-based services game – including the shuttering of Check-In Deals.

That is not the case; though there is a tweak that should affect local businesses. Purely on the location level, whether on their mobile phones, tablets, laptops, or home computers, users of the social platform can inform their friends of their location by tagging where they are. For instance, they can tag a city, a park, a pizza parlor, or a Starbucks.

In the case of the latter, when users tag a Starbucks location while on their mobile phones, they can be served a check-in deal. Ta said, “You’ll then be able to click on the deal title and will then be taken to the claim flow.”

Aaron Shapiro, CEO of the digital agency Huge, spoke about how Facebook is looking to increase its footprint in the location-based space. “They’re removing location as a standalone service – something that was not getting much traction within Facebook anyway,” he said. “They’re replacing it with something that can be far more powerful – location services that are fully integrated into the core Facebook experience.”

Lawrence Mak, product marketing manager at Efficient Frontier, commented, “The in-stream check-in aims to make location tagging as ubiquitous as people tagging in photos and posts.”

Whether Facebook users will refer to tagging their location as a “check-in” remains to be seen. The social media giant seems to be leaving its options open when it comes to the terminology coined by Foursquare, stating in an email sent to ClickZ that “Check-in Deals will continue to be called Check-in Deals for the time being.”

David Berkowitz, VP of emerging media for 360i, lauded Facebook for diversifying the way it allows users to declare their whereabouts.

“Consider how many updates you see from your friends saying where they are and what they’re doing,” Berkowitz said. “Relatively few of those posts used check-ins, but there are constant location-based posts. Each weekend, my feed is full of people saying where they are, often posting pictures to capture the moment, and if it’s easy to tag a location within those posts, a significant share of users will likely do it.”

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Facebook Updates Sharing Options, Credit Google+?

Facebook has launched a set of new privacy options that give users greater control over tags and post visibility. The new controls seem to be an attempt to match the most praised features of Google+.

Facebook’s New Features

Facebook’s post announcing the changes outlines a lot of extras, but they can be summed up as follows:

• Users will now be given the opportunity to review and approve tags before those tags are made public or the images/posts themselves appear on their user profile.
• Users can now alter the privacy settings of any given post even after the post has been published.
• It’s now possible to tag users who you’re not friends with; those users will then be able to approve or deny those tags. You can also add geo-location tags to any post.
• Several privacy controls, including sharing settings and the option to “view profile as,” have been moved to more visible locations.

Facebook also specified that the sharing menu “will be expanding over time to include smaller groups of people you may want to share with, like co-workers, Friend Lists you’ve created, and Groups you’re a member of.”

Matching Google+

Unsurprisingly, many of these features were seen as attempts to mimic Google+. Bradley Horowitz, Google Product VP for Plus, was interviewed the same day these features were initially released. Horowitz called the new settings “familiar,” but also stated that those at Google were excited to see Facebook making choices that benefited users.

Google+ was noted by comScore as the fastest growing website of all time, so it’s not hard to see Facebook’s motivation for matching unique features of their new competitor.

In addition to the announced changes that are so similar to Google+ Circles, Facebook recently announced a Skype partnership for video chatting (similar to Google+ Hangouts) and the acquisition of a mobile group-messaging service (similar to Google+ Huddle).

You Know What’s Cool? A Trillion Pageviews

Despite the introduction of Plus, Facebook is still faring well, having lost no notable chunk of its user-base since Plus’s late-June release. Facebook also saw 162 million U.S. visits in July compared to 160 million in June and 157 million in May. Meanwhile, all Google properties combined reached 182 million U.S. visits in July.

Meanwhile, Facebook hit 1 trillion pageviews in June and 870 million unique visitors, according to data from Google’s DoubleClick ad network. That works out to 1,150 pageviews per visitor (a pageview includes actions including visiting profiles, every photo clicked on, games, etc.). Coming in second was YouTube, with 790 million uniques and 100 billion page views.

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