Facebook Offers for Pages: An awesome weapon in any social campaign

For the past several months Facebook has been experimenting with a small number of businesses that have pages concerning a new feature called Facebook offers. This is truly an awesome weapon for any serious social media marketing campaign.

To qualify all you need is a Facebook page and 400 fans or more. Facebook offers are rolling out starting with as little as US$5 in order to use offers. The whole idea is to share discounts or other special promotions whereas the user needs to claim the offer and follow its instructions to claim the discount. When the user claims it also gets posted to his/her timeline to ensure more reach for advertisers.

When setting up a Facebook offer you need to add the following information:

• Choose whether it is In Store Only, In Store & Online or Online Only.
• If choosing In Store Only, You just need to add a 90 character headline for your offer with a 90px x 90px Thumbnail and Terms. You also need to set the amount of claims and what date they expire.
• If choosing In Store & Online or Online Only, you also need to specify a URL and optional discount code to use at the destination URL. This is a great way to create specialised landing pages so once people claim and go to the landing page, you can get them to do so much more and promote your services with videos and or testimonials.

Mashable recently reported that a Facebook representative showcased the success of Aria a casino resort in Las Vegas accomplished with using the offers feature:

Aria was able to book 1 500 room night reservations after running an Offer for a US$110 resort credit plus VIP passes to its Haze nightclub to customers who purchased two nights on select dates. The resort advertised the offer through Premium Page and Sponsored Stories ads that targeted fans and friends of fans. Thanks to the Offer, customers made 671 reservations for 1,585 room nights. Aria saw a nearly five-fold return on its investment.

Some ideas on how to use Facebook Offers for your business

There are many ways you can use offers to promote your business and get more leads and conversions. Here are a few personal ideas I came up with:

• Car Hire Industry: run a Facebook offer whereas people claiming the offer gets 5% – 10% discount on all rates when booking a car 3 days or more.
• Restaurant Industry: run an offer where everyone that claims and brings a party of two or more people to your restaurant they then qualify for 20% discount off their bill.
• Car Sales Industry: run a Facebook offer that gives the claimer a R100 gift voucher if they come test drive a certain car.

Look there are an endless number of great marketing ideas to use the newly available to all Facebook offers. The point is to get on board and use it now while it is still fresh and new. Please leave comments below and share with us how you feel this feature can benefit your own marketing strategy.