Mark Daniels: Can you get a deal on Facebook?

My friends would be amongst the first to tell you that I spend an unnecessarily large amount of time using Facebook and Twitter, and they're probably right.

I really didn't want to sign up to Facebook and had only just got my head around the idea of MySpace when my wife suggested it would be a good idea to sign up to the former because a lot of my friends from when I was a BDM in the Internet industry were also on there.

I didn't understand it and couldn't really see how it would benefit my life, or my business. And then I became hooked.

Given that I, like so many people in this industry, spend a great deal of my day under one roof, day-in day-out, Facebook gave me the ability to interact with my friends in a way that I'd not had before. It stopped some friendships from fizzling out completely, while it's put me back in touch with others I haven't spoken to for nearly twenty years.

A byproduct was that it also started driving people in to the pub. Prone to comical disasters, I'll often type something like "E-45 Creme does not good hair gel make," or "Just discovered that Listerine does not double up as bubble bath," into my status and customers who follow me on the Social Networking services suddenly appear in the pub to mock me. And buy beer. Therefore, I'm not afraid to make some of my more foolish errors public.

Then, last year, Facebook launched Places, and again I couldn't see the point in it. People might find my buffoonery amusing, but did they really want to see that I'd checked in to Lloyds the Chemist? Or Argos? And would I really want my wife to see in my news stream that I'd visited that Gentlemen's Club...?

But this week Facebook have launched Deals, an enhancement to their Places service. Using the application on your smartphone, simply click on Places and then go to Check-In; it will then list all the registered venues near your phone and, if any of the businesses are running special promotions, you'll see a deal. All the user has to do is Check-In and, hey presto, the special offer will be displayed on the screen, ready to claim.

So what benefit is this to our businesses? Right now, most people won't bother to check-in but if they are given an incentive to do so (free packet of peanuts, 10% off meal for two etc...) then they will, and your pub's name will suddenly start appearing in all their friends' news streams. The more regularly they check-in, the more their friends who've not visited before might think it's a good place to go...

This ability to generate such unprecedented brand awareness for small businesses like pubs will be invaluable and basically allows your followers to do your marketing for you. As the popularity of this service grows - and, let's be in no doubt, it will - so will your business's presence in the minds of your customer base, both existing and potential.

Such services aren't new. There are a variety of location-based marketing services such as Yelp and Gowalla, and even Google's Latitude service now offers the ability for users to check in and tell their friends and followers where they are, but probably the most recognisable location-based service so far is FourSquare.

Unlike the Facebook service, FourSquare makes more of a game of checking in for the users, allowing them to score points and compete with their friends to encourage them to check in to different venues, and right now the statistics reported back to venue managers are much more impressive on FourSquare than they are on Facebook.

But let's make no mistakes here. With over half a billion members, Facebook has both the market share and brand power to dominate this new market space. With it will ultimately come better promotional services and better statistical reports for venue owners.

So should we publicans get on the bandwagon and start promoting our businesses via these services? Definitely. Right now, it costs nothing other than a bit of time and effort, and the potential for return is far greater than spending countless pennies advertising in the local rag.

As for me, I'm off to post a status update about discovering that Deep Heat is not a suitable alternative to antiperspirant.