Street Fight Daily: Facebook Offers for SMBs, LBS Apps Hot
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Facebook’s ‘Offers’ News Feed Coupons Launch In Self-Serve Beta For Local U.S. Businesses (TechCrunch)
Starting yesterday, any local U.S. business can start using Facebook’s Offers product – free-to-create coupons that businesses can share to the news feed, and that users can bring to brick-and-mortar stores for redemptions. While it doesn’t cost businesses anything to run offers, Facebook could still make money on them.
Survey: Budget, Time Biggest Obstacles to Mobile Marketing for SMBs (ScreenWerk)
Network Solutions, which acquired Web.com, has put out some interesting survey findings about SMBs and mobile marketing. This was based on a survey of 500 U.S. SMBs with fewer than 100 employees. The survey found that 60% of SMB respondents had a website but only 26% had a mobile-friendly site.
Competition Among Location-Based Apps Heats Up (Crain’s New York Business)
With Foursquare crowing about reaching 20 million users and the new app Highlight stealing the show during the South by Southwest digital festival in March, it’s no surprise that other players in New York City’s startup scene are rushing to get in on the action. Growth in smartphone usage is fueling the location-based apps market nationally, observers say.
Couponing Helps Consumers Save, and Helps Save Newspapers, Too (Poynter)
Newspapers have responded to the growth of daily deals-type coupons in various ways, by partnering with established players like Groupon or developing their own sites, to varying degrees of success. Still, it was a start: “A significant presence in smart-phone commerce would count as an important business win for an industry that hasn’t had many lately,” wrote Rick Edmonds.
ThinkNear CEO Eli Portnoy on Achieving Mobile Scale (AdExchanger)
Street Fight Summit West speaker Eli Portnoy talks about the value proposition of his company, ThinkNear, and challenges it has faced: “The trickiest thing about hyperlocal is that you’re essentially filtering yourself out of an audience. To really do hyperlocal campaigns of scale, you need to start off with a very big base of impressions.”
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