New York — As anticipated, barely eight months after abandoning its Deals feature, the social networking humongous Facebook has conceived a new service dubbed as Offers, which allows businesses you have “Liked” to send coupons and deals through posts that appear in your News Feed or promoted as Sponsored Stories.
Certainly, this latest attempt is to get onto the success of sites like Groupon, the social media giant’s second gamble into the social deals craze makes it easy to get coupons for business you like to frequent.
Broadly speaking, the move will insert select offers for special deals on products and services in users’ news feeds. Facebook has the information and ability to aim ads with firm accuracy, and the program could encourage many users to “like” various brands on Facebook. Overloading them with coupons, though, could cause them to perceive Offers as spam.
“Facebook unveiled Offers in beta to a handful of clients in the U.S. after announcing it at fMC in February,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “Facebook is continuing to roll out the beta to a limited amount of businesses in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Turkey, but it is not a global roll out. It is not yet available to additional U.S. Businesses.”
Facebook first announced Offers in March at its first-ever marketing conference in New York. The feature, according to some industry experts is just another push to make ads look less conspicuous. Facebook’s approach through its latest ad initiative is similar to online daily deal hubs such as Groupon and LivingSocial.
The offers will be distributed through users’ Facebook news feeds. Then, after liking a business on Facebook, they can post deals to their page–similar to the way they would any status update–and then you will see them in your news feed.
Redeeming Facebook Offers is easy. Users can then sign up to receive the offers via email and redeem them at participating businesses. Once you see an offer that interests you in your News Feed, click the “Get Offer” link. If you have more than one email listed on your Facebook account, choose the one you would like Facebook to send the offer to.
Shortly after you picked up an offer, you will receive an email. Besides, you can either take a print out or just bring your smartphone into the business to get your discount.
In addition, there is time limit on Facebook Offers, these expiration dates have been set by the business offering them so be sure to check the date listed below the offer’s headline. The expiration date will also be included in the email you receive when you claim an offer.
Facebook Offers service, is a way for users to get discounts and promotions from local businesses via the social networking site. Although, Offers is in some ways different, however — with Groupon, for instance, a deal must be purchased before it is utilized. On the other hand, a Facebook Offers discount or promotion is free and simply must be presented at the time of purchase.
However, the feature is just being rolled out now, so you not everyone would be able to see a lot of deals just yet–but depending on how customizable the experience is, this may not be all that bad of a feature.
Lastly, if you want to avoid seeing Offers, you are going to have to Unlike all the Pages you have Liked so far. You can do that now, or you can simply Unlike the Facebook Pages that start stuffing your News Feed with Offers. Besides, it all depends how businesses use Offers, this could be a very useful or very annoying feature on Facebook.
Facebook did not respond to our requests for more comment. Also, more information is available at facebook.com/help/offers, but it should be noted this is a gradual roll out, as always.
Check out the video above to see more:
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