Facebook to take over location-based marketing
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Stacey Vanek-Smith: You can use your smart phone to find just about anything these days: Your friends, the nearest pizza place — and now the friends and the pizza place can find you, too. It’s called location-based marketing, and the world’s largest social network is about to get in on the game. Janet Babin reports.
Janet Babin: Facebook hasn’t revealed much about its new service, but it would be the biggest player in location-based marketing.
Larry Weber is chairman of marketing services company W2. He says geo-location could help Facebook’s 400 million users find each other:
Larry Weber: You want to know where your friends are, or gee, I graduated from this college in 1992, I wonder if anybody I graduated with is in New York today.
Businesses would like to know who’s in New York today too, and just about everywhere else.
Greg Warren: Retail is about location and mindset, so if it gets two of those down, and facilitated by groups of friends, that’s a lot going for it.
That’s Greg Warren, an executive with MediaVest, a media buying firm. He says with Facebook’s new service, advertisers could target people nearby, and offer them deals to get them in the door.
I’m Janet Babin for Marketplace.
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