Chapter 14
Location-Based Services
In This Chapter
Blending online and offline outreach
Building connections around locations
Growing communities with images
Enhancing real-world events with mobile marketing
This chapter details how you can hold the power of community and social media engagement in the palm of your hand — literally. An amazing thing happened in the past decade: Our telephones became more portable and more powerful than you probably ever imagined. With smartphones, we’re carrying mini computers around, not to mention still and video cameras, audio recording devices, and myriad other tools that use a variety of software applications.
The increasing ubiquity of smartphones brings a seemingly endless supply of mobile applications you can download for free, or for a small fee, that perform many different functions. Some of those applications lead to social networks accessed primarily on mobile devices instead of through the web. These social mobile networks often use the GPS feature in smartphones as an integral part of their services. All of the popular web-based social networks that have corresponding mobile apps can also tap into your location coordinates. In this chapter, we focus mostly on the social networks predominantly based in mobile apps, which we call location-based services (LBS).
Bridging the Real and Online Worlds with LBS
Social mobile networks give you a whole new way to engage with your customers and prospects. You may have been told that reaching others in their e-mail inboxes or through their favorite social networks on the web is a more intimate way to communicate and connect with them. Making contact through someone’s smartphone or other hand-held mobile device ups that intimacy even further.
A location-based service is a social mobile network that ties directly into your mobile device’s Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates and uses your location to tag your photos and your posts. Location and place are an integral part of how these services work. Practically every social mobile network prompts you to give permission to access your location to unlock functionality tied to where you are at any given moment.
Using LBS means you can connect and communicate with others, combining both a physical location and a mobile device. Location plays a major part in the functionality of an LBS, so look for ways to tie in places to your social media engagement messaging and outreach.
Choosing an LBS (or two)
Here are some of the popular and newer social mobile networks that rely on or incorporate your location:
Foursquare (https://foursquare.com): If you have a business with a physical location, you can claim the actual address on this service based on the GPS coordinates, allowing your customers to check in there. People nearby can discover your establishment and read tips or recommendations. The service also includes gaming features and badges. It combines check-ins, tips, deals, and images. This service is available — and most commonly used — on smartphones: iPhones, Androids, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.
Path (https://path.com): This service aggregates check-ins, photos, videos, music, movies, and other moments that you create on Path or by importing content from other social networks. It emphasizes smaller connections — limited to 150 people — so it's more suitable for communicating with niche groups. You can use this service on iPhones and Androids.
Foodspotting (www.foodspotting.com): Use this app to take photographs of meals at eating establishments and to find places to eat by perusing snapshots of dishes served nearby. Even if you aren't a restaurant, you can build your reputation by sharing great food images and reviews that tie back to your brand. This service is available for iPhones, Androids, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.
SCVNGR (http://scvngr.com): You can build games or challenges that others can play based around locations — think scavenger hunt. As a business, you can brand experiences that other people can enjoy. It's available for iPhones and Androids.
For a related suggestion, see the sidebar “Engaging with geocaching,” at the end of this chapter.
Yelp (www.yelp.com): Yelp (see Figure 14-1) started as a web-based review site where users could leave reviews of businesses. Its mobile app also includes discovery of places nearby with the reviews. As a business, you should review what people are saying about you. The app is available for iPhones, Androids, Windows, BlackBerry, and Palm.
Figure 14-1: Yelp is both a review website and a social mobile app.
In addition to LBS, you can market to and engage customers through their mobile devices in other ways. Near field communication (NFC) lets two devices (a data chip and a smartphone, for example) in the same area communicate with one another. And location-based advertising (LBA) uses geofencing, in which virtual boundaries trigger pop-up messages on people’s mobile devices when they are moving within specific locations. Learn more about these topics in the book Location Based Marketing For Dummies, by Aaron Strout (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).
Setting up an LBS account
As a business, you can establish presences on LBS as an individual representing your company or a “personality,” as the company itself, or both.
We recommend that you set up both company accounts and personal accounts and limit the number of people who can post to your company account. In social media engagement, you want to infuse your brand with personality and presence so that people want to connect and interact with your company. Having a brand presence on LBS is a perfectly acceptable way to demonstrate aspects of your brand that can attract customers and prospects and deepen relationships.
Personal accounts
Using an individual, personal account on any LBS is convenient and easy to set up. Also, people like to first and foremost connect with other people. A personal photo in a profile is much more approachable than a company logo.
If you go the individual route, you may end up with less company branding and some brand confusion. You also have to be careful not to use your personal account in a personal manner that may not properly reflect your brand image. If you want team members to participate on behalf of the brand, you don’t want them to use your personal account, but setting up multiple personal accounts for people who are supposed to represent your brand means more accounts to monitor.
Business accounts
Using an LBS as a company keeps your brand image consistent and carries it over into the new social mobile space. There is a lot to be said about branding consistency in social media engagement. Because most LBS are not set up specifically for companies, you may have to finesse some of the profile elements to convey the personality of the brand and not an individual person behind your brand.
Going the company or brand route can be problematic if you or your team members also have personal accounts on the same service. For the most part, LBS are not set up to accommodate multiple accounts on the same mobile device. In order to toggle between a personal and company account, you have to log out of one and log in to the other. You can get into some hot water if you forget which account you’re logged in to at any given time and post something inappropriate to your company account.
Making Connections with LBS
Although most LBS tap into your mobile device’s GPS, each one tries to differentiate itself by using location data in different ways. Each service allows you to connect with others in the same way web-based social networks do. LBS have similar connection, conversation, and community-building features described throughout this book, such as profiles, friends, liking and favoriting, and comments.
The difference between LBS and other types of smartphone apps that allow you to have a profile and connect with others is that it incorporates GPS as a basis for connection, discovery, and tagging posts to tie them to a place. Other social networks and mobile versions of social networks, such as Pinterest and LinkedIn, don’t make active use of location data.
Checking in to locations to engage others
The act of checking in to locations may seem like a strange activity, but millions of people do it every day as a way of connecting with others and announcing what they’re doing and where. Even if people are not actively checking in to a place using an app with a check-in feature, they might post from a location — your physical business location — and tag their post or even their photograph with GPS data. Many share these check-ins and geotagged posts and photos on several social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
People check in to locations for a variety of reasons:
Letting their friends know where they are: When someone is frequenting your establishment, encouraging them to check in can increase exposure to your brand and location.
Organizing impromptu meet-ups with connections based on proximity: As a business, you can benefit from additional foot traffic when someone uses an LBS to gather others to your location.
Broadcasting their activities as part of their general social network sharing: Check-ins share your location name, increasing your brand exposure.
Leaving tips, kudos, or critiques of businesses they frequent: Use check-ins as a customer service and marketing tool by noting what people like or where they may have a complaint and taking action to improve their experiences.
Accessing specials and deals from companies leveraging LBS marketing: Stimulate interactions with customers by tying deals and offers into popular LBS.
Competing with their friends for status: This includes top positions on leaderboards, or badges, or kudos.
For details on how to use check-ins for promotions, see “Offering deals driven by check-ins,” later in this chapter.
GPS location isn't highly accurate for indoor spaces. If you're looking to create check-ins within an indoor space, ByteLights (http://bytelight.com) are LED lights that help feed data about a customer's movement and activities within a confined space. The company's technology claims one meter of accuracy, which is far closer than typical GPS provides.
Discovering others nearby
Several LBS take professional networking to a whole new level using proximity, or notifying you when people you know through social networks are nearby. Apps that point out proximity to people, places, and things are also known as geosocial discovery apps.
Apps such as Banjo (http://ban.jo), Highlight (http://highlig.ht), and Sonar (http://sonar.me), all available for iPhones or Android phones, announce when people you might know are nearby. Highlight tells you when your Facebook friends and other Highlight users are physically close to you. Sonar uses data from your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn accounts while Banjo accesses data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Instagram, Vimeo, and Google to determine relevant connections. The app Here On Biz (http://hereon.biz/) taps solely into your LinkedIn account.
Using geosocial discovery apps can be helpful for real-world networking; you can meet social networking connections in person or meet friends of your connections through the serendipity of being nearby. Although you can link geosocial discovery apps to your company’s Twitter and Foursquare accounts, you can’t link them to your company’s Facebook Page or LinkedIn Company Page — only to your personal Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
Tying images to places through geotagging
Although some apps use active check-ins or automatically add geographic information to tie posts to physical locations, some also use geotagging to tie images, particularly photographs, to places. Some of these apps incorporate geotagging into main features on the service while others let you decide when to tie images to a location.
In addition to Foodspotting (mentioned earlier in this chapter), there are a number of LBS that center around geotagged photographs and content including
Instagram (http://instagram.com): Instagram describes itself as "a fun and quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures." As a business, you can build a community by lifestreaming images to showcase your brand's personality and provide a more intimate look at your company. You can take photos, filter them, label them, and share them with your followers who can "like" them or comment on them. You can also integrate Instagram with other social networks as we detail later in this chapter. It's available for iPhones and Android phones.
Trover (www.trover.com): With this app, people find and explore places and hidden gems around the world. Even if you aren't a company with a physical location or have anything to do with travel, you can create lists of local businesses as resource guides and build your brand and reputation on the network, exposing your brand to new people. It's available for iPhone and Android.
Wyst (http://wyst.it): Use this app to leave notes and photographs at specific locations to be accessed by others using the app when they're in the vicinity. As a company, you can publish helpful notes around your local location or other places to build your brand and showcase your expertise. If you're a business with a physical location or if being local is important to your business, this type of activity makes sense. Even if you're traveling on business, you can "leave behind" virtual posts for other Wyst users to find. It's available for iPhone only.
As a business, you can use mobile photo sharing apps that use geotagging to tie images to your location or to tie your images to locations that others can discover in a search or when in close proximity to the location where your images are tagged.
Watch that you don’t accidentally reveal your location when you don’t mean to do so. As you set up social mobile networks on your smartphone or mobile device, make sure that you check settings and permissions within the app or on your phone to limit the use of your location data. Settings vary by each app and each type of phone.
Using LBS for Promotions
Not all LBS offer business features. Most are geared toward the individual user and aren’t tailored for companies or brands looking to engage with others through social mobile networks. Most LBS don’t offer separate or enhanced features for businesses like Facebook offers Facebook Pages, but they also don’t forbid companies from setting up personal accounts for their brands or businesses.
Most LBS don’t have features to accommodate companies or brands like LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ offer with distinct Business Pages. Many newer social mobile networks tend to focus first on individual users to quickly build a large base that, in time, will be attractive to companies. Foursquare is an exception because it rolled out features to support companies fairly early in its development.
Pushing messages to people on their mobile devices can come across as creepy or invasive. Make sure you get people’s permissions before adding them to your mobile or location-based marketing programs. Compiling your own mobile marketing list or using reputable LBS that people willingly join and are comfortable using reduces the chances that you’ll turn them off with your mobile actions.
Doing business with Foursquare
Foursquare offers businesses free tools for attracting, retaining, and rewarding customers.
Claiming your business
If you have a physical location for your business such as a retail store or restaurant, start by claiming your business on Foursquare at https://foursquare.com/signup. Use Foursquare's search function to check if your business is already listed. If so, you can claim it by clicking the Claim Here link under the text Do You Manage this Location? Follow Foursquare's step-by-step instructions to claim your business.
If your business is not already listed, you can first add it while you are physically at your place of business and then follow the instructions to claim it.
Using Foursquare for business
After you have a claimed business location on Foursquare, you can update your listing and post updates from your location. You can also offer specials to attract customers and post events taking place at your location. Offer rewards to loyal customers — the mayors — who check in to your establishment often. Only one person can be mayor of an establishment at a time.
As shown in Figure 14-2, Foursquare also provides analytics for your claimed business. You can see check-in activity, including number of check-ins and how many were broadcast to Facebook, Twitter, or both. You can also see information about the mayor of your location and top visitors. Foursquare also sends weekly e-mails with the most recent tips and photos submitted by your customers.
Change your specials often enough to keep repeat customers interested, and be clear about what you’re offering and how customers who check in can access or claim the offer.
Tell your customers that your business is on Foursquare and encourage them to check in. You can order a free window cling to put into your establishment’s window to signify that you’re on Foursquare. Foursquare also lets you set up events at your location so customers can check in to an event at your establishment.
Figure 14-2: Foursquare’s dashboard provides data about your business and customers.
Tapping into the power of Instagram
Instagram is a wildly popular social mobile network that, until the end of 2012, existed only on smartphones. The value of Instagram’s super loyal user-base and photo-sharing community was confirmed when Facebook bought the company for $1 billion. Photographs are a powerful part of online storytelling, and we talk earlier in this book about how images are an important part of social content and social media engagement.
Sharing photos on popular networks
Use Instagram to take, filter, and share images on popular social networks in addition to the Instagram community. You can set up an account on Instagram as your company in the same way you’d set up a personal account.
As a business, you can use Instagram to tell stories about your company, product, or services. Some ideas for images you can post include
Behind-the-scenes at your company headquarters or locations
Events you host or attend
Images from your business travels
Product images
Images that portray themes in line with your brand messages
How-to or demonstration shots
Images with quotes
You can use mobile apps such as Overgram for iPhone or Phonto for iPhone and Android phones to add text to your photos to create popular quote images. You can add text on top of photographs you’ve taken and post directly to Instagram. Other apps let you create text-only images for Instagram such as Whims for iPhone and TextCutie for Android.
See “Linking LBS for integrated posts,” later in this chapter, for a breakdown of other networks that you can connect to your Instagram account.
Using Instagram for promotions
In addition to tying Instagram into your social networks, you can incorporate the app and its photo-sharing capabilities into promotions and contests.
In early 2012, retailer Tiffany & Co. began a campaign called True Love In Pictures. People were invited to take photos of themselves with their significant others. If they used Instagram to submit images, they were instructed to use the hashtag #truelovepictures and other hashtags. The company created a microsite called WhatMakesLoveTrue.com as a destination about the art of romance. The site, shown in Figure 14-3, included a gallery of photo submissions. The site included filters that users could add to their own photographs as well as a tool to add photo captions and prompts such as "True love lasts forever when ________ #TimelessTrueLove." The site also lets users send a Love Note with their images. Couples visiting the company's New York City, London, and Tokyo stores could take pictures in photo booths at each location and upload to the website.
Figure 14-3: Tiffany & Co. posted users’ photos on a website created for a specific promotion.
Use the Statigram contest toolkit (http://statigr.am/instagram-contest-toolkit) to organize, implement, and track a photo contest on Instagram. Tie the photo contest to a place, use a hashtag to tie the images together, and leverage the images on other social networks. Instagram users will spread the word about the contest and extend your brand to their followers simply by entering.
Linking LBS for integrated posts
Depending on the LBS you’re using, you can connect it to other LBS. Most services let you connect to other services, and then give you the choice with each post if you’d like to broadcast more widely.
Using one LBS to post to several others is a common way to cross-post to get more use out of the content you’re producing while engaging in social mobile networks. By providing your followers across multiple platforms with content, you create more touch points to stay top of mind with them. Although you may have some overlap of audiences, chances are most people won’t be on all the services you’re using. Even if they are, you’re reaching them in different ways on different services at different times.
Table 14-1 shows some of the most popular LBS and the services they can connect with for broader posting. Connecting to Facebook and Twitter is common; however, the connection to Facebook goes to your personal Timeline, not your Facebook Page. Two social networks that work well with many LBS are Flickr, a longstanding social network for photo sharing, and Tumblr, a multimedia blogging platform that continues to grow in popularity.
The apps that connect to Facebook are connecting with your personal Facebook Timeline and not your Facebook Page. You can still repurpose the images you take and upload to these services onto your Facebook Page. The most straightforward way is to upload the images you’ve taken for these services that are also saved on your phone. You can also take a screenshot of some of your check-ins and posts and upload them to your Page.
Use the tools at IFTTT (If This Then That, http://ifttt.com) to link apps that aren't typically linked. Use this website to create formulas or "recipes" that let you choose one social network, LBS, or website, and specify an action that will take place. An action could be when you post a photo to Instagram using the tag #social, it posts to your Facebook Page. For another example, when you check in on Foursquare with a photo, it's posted to your Tumblr.
We talk earlier in this chapter about using Foursquare and Instagram for promotions and customer loyalty programs. You can incorporate other LBS into promotions in similar ways. Some services build in tools that let you create deals or offers and tie them into your location. You can also tie rewards to actions that bring people to you through an LBS, such as “follow us on Instagram, and we’ll pick a random winner each month to receive these cool products.”
As long as you have a presence and a following, or connections in an LBS, or an audience primed and ready to join those services and engage with you on them, you have the potential to draw people in to participate in activities such as contests. When they participate, their actions can help spread the word about your brand and boost your outreach in new forums.
You can run online/offline promotions and activities using the mobile apps for popular social networks and tie them into your Facebook Page Timeline or Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, or Pinterest (and so on) accounts. The more popular the app, the more likely people already have it on their mobile devices, and you’ve skipped the extra step of asking them to download a new app.
Offering deals driven by check-ins
As we mention, not all LBS have set up specific features for companies or brands. Although most also don’t forbid you from creating a presence for your brand instead of for you as an individual, the limited features and support for businesses can be challenging if you’re trying to use the service for promotional purposes.
LBS rely on location, and when you create a promotion, you want to tie it to a place that either you own or can control, even for a short period of time. If you do not have a business with a physical location where others can visit and check in, you could still create a location or promotion at a trade show, conference, or other event as long as you plan for something with a short duration.
Tying your promotions to a more public space can be an interesting way to engage people who are using an LBS and pass through an area that you’ve tagged. Tagging spaces, however, could involve getting permission from the owners of the space. In most cases, however, tagging places with virtual data such as offers and challenges should not create a conflict, although this fact may change as more people and companies use geotagging, geofencing, and geo-apps.
Table 14-2 lists LBS that do offer businesses ways to leverage the check-in feature to provide users with a special offer or experience.
Don’t tag your competition’s space. Although there are no legal precedents at this time about creating virtual tags or uploading photos, comments, or tips about your business at the location of your competitor, at the very least you’ll create bad blood. There may be no rules dictating ownership of GPS coordinates, but use the Golden Rule when dropping geocontent in places you don’t own. Don’t do anything to someone else you wouldn’t want them to do to you and your space.
Newer deal and offer platforms are surfacing to leverage consumers' greater comfort with marketing and commerce on their mobile phones. Some newer mobile platforms that let you create special offers for others include Gyft (http://gyft.com), Apple's Passbook (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5483), and Google Wallet (http://www.google.com/wallet/).
Adding Mobile to Your Engagement Mix
Adding mobile marketing activities to your social media engagement can happen using other mobile tools and platforms in addition to LBS, so we cover just a few to round out your social mobile engagement mix. The main difference between LBS and other mobile marketing tools is community. LBS have features that let you build communities because they’re social networks on mobile platforms.
Other mobile marketing tools are not about forming communities but reaching your communities through their smartphones and mobile devices via texting or SMS, the phone’s web browser, or using other apps. A common benefit of LBS and other mobile marketing outreach is that it adds new ways of engaging with customers and prospects in more personal and intimate ways.
Reaching customers through SMS marketing
We talk about the importance of opt-in e-mail lists for marketing and engagement with customers and prospects. Another type of opt-in or permission-based list that you can explore is a mobile marketing list. Getting permission to send your customers or prospects text messages or SMS (short message service) is a forward-thinking move toward mobile marketing.
You can compile your mobile marketing list in a variety of ways including
A sign-up form on your website
Posts on Facebook leading to a Facebook app with a sign-up form
Calls to action on your social networks leading back to a web-based, mobile-friendly form
Signs at your business location using QR codes to lead to a form (See the next section for more information about QR codes.)
Point-of-sale forms that customers can fill out
Verbally requesting permission to sign up your customers
Retailer REI used a service offered by Placecast called ShopAlerts (http://placecast.net/) to create location-based messaging and time-based messaging pushed to customer mobile devices. Customers had to first provide their mobile numbers and give permission for REI to engage with them through SMS. Then Placecast helped REI build virtual boundaries near its stores that triggered messages to customers who had opted to receive texts. The messages helped drive customers to REI stores when they were nearby.
Food company Udi’s Gluten Free prompts customers to give it their mobile phone numbers in its contact form and includes a check box for receiving mobile updates with special offers and seasonal promotions on its site and shared on other sites and blogs, as shown in Figure 14-4.
If you create a mobile app for your location or business, you can include pop-up notifications that are triggered when people are close to particular GPS coordinates. For these notifications to work, people must first download your app, then give the app permission to tap into their phone’s GPS, then allow notifications. Once over those humps, you can push messages to them based on specific locations. You can also advertise on other people’s apps that sell push notifications as part of their advertising services.
Figure 14-4: This opportunity to sign up to receive mobile updates comes with a coupon.
Using QR codes for location-based marketing
QR codes or quick response codes were originally created by Toyota as two-dimensional black and white bar codes for its inventory tracking system. Today, these codes can come in a variety of shapes and colors as long as they maintain the key “hotspots” of the code. The codes can represent text and numbers, including website URLs.
A QR code is read by a QR code scanner app that you download to your smartphone. After you scan a code, it can either trigger an action or lead to a destination site. You scan a QR code to go on a social network, access additional information and resources including videos, make a purchase or donation, or take other online actions that can be completed easily on a smartphone.
QR codes can appear on a variety of real-world items and act as a bridge between the offline and online spaces. Using QR codes can help you interact with customers and prospects even when they aren’t necessarily online but still have their smartphone with them or easily accessible. Some of the places where you can place a QR code include product packaging, signage, clothing, and marketing collateral.
The key to successfully integrating QR codes into your marketing mix is to carefully consider the destination where the code leads and making sure it’s mobile-friendly. Even the actions you want people to take should be easy to do on a smartphone or the small screen of any mobile or Wi-Fi–enabled device. Don’t require too much typing or too much reading. Think fast, easy, one-click, short, and sweet.
Laptop Lunches uses a QR code on its cardboard packaging that wraps around its colorful plastic bento-style lunch boxes. The code leads to a very mobile-friendly site with images of bento-ware lunch ideas. The images are large, and the content is mostly visual without requiring much text to get the information across (as shown in Figure 14-5). At a glance, busy parents can get inspiration for their children’s lunches that fit perfectly into Laptop Lunches’ bento-ware.
Figure 14-5: Laptop Lunches opts for large images with little text to provide meal tips and ideas for kids’ lunches via SMS messaging.
Although it may seem clever to put a QR code on a billboard, keep in mind that the chances of someone in a car being able to scan the code from the road, much less do so safely, are slim. A QR code on a poster at the airport or on a bus or subway makes more sense because people have time to safely pull out their phones and fire up their QR code scanners.
When you use QR codes at physical locations, include a call to action. “Scan this code and be entered to win a prize” or “Scan this code to follow us on Facebook” may seem obvious, but most people need you to spell out for them why they should fire up their QR code scanner and scan your code. Also determine what QR code scanner you’ll use and recommend to your customers and prospects.
Some QR code scanners offer QR code services such as mobile landing sites for QR codes and custom-designed QR codes. Scan (http://scan.me) for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone offers free mobile sites. Paperlinks (www.paperlinks.com) for iPhone offers a paid service for mobile sites and can provide custom-designed QR codes in a variety of shapes and colors that can also include your company logo or other objects or images in the code. Work with a designer skilled in QR code customization to ensure the design doesn't interfere with the code scanning.
Don’t use QR codes that are too small to function or too dark to scan. Your QR code should be no smaller than 1-x-1 inch square and preferably larger. Make sure the background of your code is much lighter than the code itself for optimal scanning.
Geolocating and geotagging
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention how Facebook uses geolocation for its Facebook Places feature. Although this isn’t a main aspect of its overall service, and Facebook is also a web-based network, its initial Places service was competitive to Foursquare in particular when it first rolled out, even though now it’s integrated with Pages. Plus, Facebook offers businesses options for reaching its customers through this feature, unlike many of the newer LBS.
Facebook Places lets users add a location to their posts so if they are at your place of business, they can tag their posts with the location. In the past, companies could set up a Place on Facebook. Now the Place feature is combined with a company Facebook Page if you’ve designated your Page as a business establishment with a location. For people to be able to check in to your place of business, select Local Business or Place when setting it up and add your business address.
Even if you don’t have a Facebook Page, people can still check in to your location by adding a new location as they try to check in. Clearly, having your own Facebook Page facilitates this process and adds the number of people who have checked in to your location. Figure 14-6 shows this number next to number of Likes and people “talking about this.”
People can check in to Facebook Pages with locations when they’re nearby. Even if you’ve never made a Facebook Page for your business, people may still be able to check in there by creating a new location when they check in.
In addition to Facebook, you can use the mobile apps of other popular social networks to add location or geotagging to your posts and images including Twitter (Chapter 10), Google+ (Chapter 13), and Flickr (www.flickr.com).
Figure 14-6: The number of people who check in appears at the top of your Facebook Page.
Creating hybrid online/offline engagement
A natural fit for creating engagement that crosses from offline to online and back are applications like SCVNGR (mentioned previously) that tie to GPS coordinates linking to online content. The online content then leads to instructions for offline activities such as scavenger hunts, quests, and other challenges.
The key to successful hybrid online/offline mobile-powered campaigns that tie into your overall social media engagement is careful planning, including
Your main goals and the goals of your campaign
The audience you’re trying to reach
The specific action or actions you’d like them to do
The destination site or sites that will house instructions, resources, or related information
The online and social mobile tools and platforms you’ll use to carry out the campaign
The online and social mobile tools and platforms you’ll use to promote the campaign
The offline tools and materials you’ll use to promote the campaign
Map out the entire process from start to finish for how your social mobile initiative will work. Plan the fewest steps possible to complete a successful hybrid activity or campaign. You’ll more likely have fewer participants if your activity or promotion is long, arduous, confusing, or convoluted.
You’ll have more success with fewer barriers to entry such as making sure that at least both iPhone and Android users can participate unless you are specifically targeting one platform over the other. If your activity requires that people download an application, make it easy to do so and consider providing additional incentive such as random drawings with prizes.