By Ashley Graves
When I moved to the Chicago area a little less than a year ago, one of my most useful finds was the website Groupon.com.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Groupon is a group discount website. It provides coupons on activities, restaurants and services—as long as enough people purchase the deal. Groupon enabled me to try new things in an unfamiliar city, with a cool discounted price.
Over the past year, couponing websites like Groupon have exploded. And for good reason — consumers still want to have fun experiences in the cities they live in despite a less-than-booming economy.
Last week, a new application for Facebook called Group Deals was introduced. Group Deals lets companies provide fans with a deal-a-day coupon for their products or services on their Facebook fan pages.
This new application (the first of what I bet will be many) has excellent potential for brands to provide concrete value for their Facebook fans and reinforce consumers’ liking or loyalty to a product or service.
As an added bonus, because friends frequently view a Facebook user’s activity, the ability for these deals to spread would greatly increase.
Word-of-mouth, the much sought after and hard to create integrated marketing tool, has huge potential here. Facebook’s public news feed will display purchase decisions made by a user to their close friends and family, people who care about their opinions and influence their decisions.
The only potential drawback is for items that someone might not want their Facebook friends to see they have purchased. Do you really want your mom to see that you’ve bought five bar coupons in a week? Or for that cute guy you met last weekend to know you’re planning to attend a six-week diet bootcamp?
By connecting the purchase of a deal directly to a Facebook application, brands will be better able to track the value of their Facebook fan page (an issue still hotly up for debate). The potential to calculate a rough return on investment from social media might have some doubters in the marketing world singing a different tune.
Will Group Deals on Facebook be a win-win for consumers and brands alike?
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Ashley Graves is the Editorial Director at Vitamin IMC and a student in the Masters in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University’s Medill School. She is hoping that her favorite clothing retailers will decide to use Group Deals. She can be reached at AshleyGraves2010@u.northwestern.edu.
