By Anna Majek, Social Media and Communication Executive, Sensewhere
Given that Facebook has lost almost half its value since its floatation in May, it was no surprise to hear the company’s 28 year old founder Mark Zuckerberg expressed his “disappointment”.
Analysts fear that Facebook has, so far, been unable to find a way to make money from its mobile users, the fastest growing sector of its business.
But it’s way too early to write-off Facebook’s chances of commercial success in the mobile space. Facebook is still in great shape to benefit from the next big movement in mobile advertising: indoor positioning and more precise hyper-local positioning in general.
The future is indoors
Indoor location services are the next untapped frontier in mobile marketing. The opportunities to monetize indoor location, in advertising, coupons and app functionality, are vast.
For example, a woman posts on Facebook that she’s going into town to buy a handbag for a wedding. When she reaches the shopping mall, it would be useful if she could receive news of offers on handbags from retailers in the mall direct to her mobile; because the marketing information is both relevant and hyper-local it is welcomed rather seen as an annoyance.
Likewise, the owners of the mall could benefit from the business intelligence that indoor positioning can deliver, for example, measuring footfall in different parts of the mall. This information could then be used to help set rents for individual retail units or influence the marketing strategies and use of signage.
Fundamentally there is only one economical approach to maintaining consistently accurate, self-correcting indoor positioning and this is the automatic crowd sourcing and cross-referencing of RF beacons.
In Facebook’s favour
Facebook is actually in a fantastic position to tap the commercial potential of indoor positioning for a number of reasons.
Facebook is expected to sign-up its one billionth user later this year. With a user base of that size, it could easily build up one of the world’s largest dynamic location databases that would be self-correcting should the RF reference points be moved around. Facebook could foster a system that essentially builds and maintains itself; a system that its competitors would find it very difficult to rival.
People share an enormous amount of data on Facebook about their likes and dislikes, their geographic position, their friends and family and their plans for the future. For marketers, this information is pure gold, allowing them (providing the appropriate permissions are in place) to data-mine this information and identify the most relevant, local marketing messages to target individual consumers with. Facebook is still in a great position.
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