Facebook Deals Will Change The Way You Market Your Fitness Business

I rarely talk about newsy type things on My Business Is Fitness, but something very exciting happened today in the marketing world that's going to change the way you promote your brick and mortar personal training business or fitness center forever and the best part is, you have the opportunity to get in at the very beginning.

Facebook Deals

If you're like the other 499,999,999 people in the world that have a Facebook account, you may already be familiar with their places application, which is a way for you to log your location to your profile using your Smartphone (iphone, Android, Blackberry).

Because I use Foursquare (a location marketing site), I never really took to the Facebook application; however, it seems that places was all part of Facebook's major plan to join the location based social network marketing bandwagon.

Take a look at this short Facebook Deals video which should bring you up to speed:



As you can see in the video, Facebook Deals will finally provide offline businesses social media value.

From Facebook's Jon Fougner:

"Everyone likes getting a good deal, but it's not always easy to find the right one at the moment you could use one. Imagine that while you're looking for a new place to try for lunch, you could see offers from restaurants nearby on your phone. On the other hand, I already love Zachary's Pizza, so imagine if I were rewarded for coming back there every week with my friends.

Starting today, local businesses will be able to offer you deals when you check in to their place on Facebook. Deals will be rolling out over the next few days and will only be available in the United States at this time."

Obviously since this is so new and I don't have access to the application yet, I'm only speculating at the awesome potential Facebook Deals can have for all offline fitness businesses.

What this is all about and why you want to make your 'Deals' so attractive is so people 'check in' to your business and essentially expose your brand, service, location to everyone of their friends and their friends friends when someone 'likes' what they're up to i.e at your business.

Even though the immediate and long-term impact of Facebook Deals is undetermined, I'm going to be watching it's development very closely and genuinely encourage all offline fitness businesses to take a look at this with an eye toward becoming an early adopter; so watch this space.

Are any of you guys currently using any of the other location based social media marketing sites like Foursquare, Loopt or Gowalla and have you found them useful to promote your fitness businesses?

Ben