Deals | Home Wealth Project

Facebook, Yelp Follow FourSquare, Launch Deals

Nov 9th

Posted by Home Wealth Project in Business Trends

Last week both Facebook and Yelp announced they’d soon be offering deals to customers who check in at a particular location. Good idea, right? FourSquare sure thought so when they launched it months ago.

On the Yelp blog, Luther Lowe didn’t give specifics but hinted that the review site would soon offer Yelp Check-In Offers to “help further bridge online discovery and online buying.” According to the blog post, Check-In Offers will be different from Sales and Special Offers and will give users discounts when they check in to locations. As ReadWriteWeb stated last week, the check in feature does make a lot of sense for Yelp to incorporate. Yelp has always been a site dedicated to local discovery and matching users with SMBs. This seems like a very natural extension of that. While Luther didn’t offer many details, this will be a nice addition to the site.

But Yelp wasn’t the only company to announced check in offers last week; Facebook did as well.

Facebook took the stage last week to announce a number of enhancements to its mobile platform. They announced new features like Facebook Groups for Mobile, a Facebook Places API, Single Sign-In to sign into other sites with one click, Facebook Places for the iPhone, etc. However, none of what they announced rocked the blogosphere more than the announcement of Facebook Deals.

Facebook Deals is exactly what it sounds like – a new service that will allow SMB owners to offer their customers special deals when they check in to their business on Facebook. According to Facebook, Deals will come in four different flavors:

Free merchandise or other reward
Friend deals where you and your friends clam an offer together
Loyalty deals for being a frequent visitor to a place [similar to Mayor deals offered on FourSquare]
Charity deals where businesses pledge to donate to a cause when you check in

Facebook already has more than 20 major brands signed up to offer deals, including 24 Hour Fitness, American Eagle, Gap, JCPenney, Macy’s and Starbucks. And we’re not just talking about offering a free cup of coffee or pastry either. Some of these deals are surprisingly enticing. For example, Gap will give a free pair of jeans to the first 10,000 customers to claim the deal, and the San Francisco 49ers will offer 200 fans tickets for just $49.

When you combine the quality of the deals with the brands behind them and Facebook’s active 200 million mobile users a month, the power of Facebook Deals become quite evident. While FourSquare and Groupon have had a hard time attracting mainstream users, Facebook has already captured these folks. That gives them a great advantage in the mobile space.

Once the program is rolled out, business owners will be able to easily create Facebook Deals from a single screen. Business listings that include a deal will be given a yellow marker on the Nearby Places page to signify that a deal exists and encourage users to click through and check it out.

To view the deal, users must pull up the Facebook Place page, where they can then claim it. Business owners who take part in Facebook Deals will be able to see how many people have claimed a specific deal vs. how many people have checked into their business. They won’t be able to tie the check-in to a specific user, just like they can’t see which user clicked on a Facebook ad.

If you’re a small business owner, Yelp Check-In Offers and Facebook Deals are definitely programs you’ll want to take a look at. Discounts and coupons have time and time again proven to be one of the leading reasons that social media users interact with brands online. By pairing an enticing deal with a relevant audience, there’s a huge opportunity. We’re still waiting for further information from Yelp about Check-In Offers, but you can find out more about Facebook Deals here.

From Small Business Trends

Facebook, Yelp Follow FourSquare, Launch Deals

View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends

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How to Get the Best Deals On Business Travel

Oct 28th

Posted by Home Wealth Project in Marketing Tips

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How to Get the Best Deals On Business Travel

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Image credit: Ack Ook via Flickr

Even with all of the web apps, virtual assistants, and online meeting tools available these days, there are lots of great reasons to get out of the office and out of town to meet face to face.

Meeting a big and getting to really know the entire team, going to conferences to network and learn and visiting the facilities of key strategic partners are just a few of the kinds of business activities that require travel.

The travel business has been impacted by the Internet in much the same way that many have been. Travel aggregators and deal sights like Expedia are starting to give way to a new bread of user friendly, socially powered tools that make getting deals on travel much less of a hassle.

Businesses that do any amount of travel can tap these tools to significantly reduce the cost of business travel.

Best for flights

Kayak.com gives real time flight data that can be sorted and filtered in hundreds of ways including maps. I like that they give you a link directly to the airlines to book the tickets as there’s usually no advantage to booking through the service and can add a layer of red tape if you ever want to change the ticket. As you might expect they also offer iPhone and Android apps. I’ve tried other sites such as Bing Travel and Kayak always seems to have the best data with the least amount of hassle.

Best for hotels

Actually I find it hard to beat Priceline.com for hotel deals. They are one of the originals in the category and I don’t use them for anything else, but if I’m trying to find a deal on a name brand hotel in Manhattan, I can always get one for about 50% off the published price. Priceline is a bid type deal so you name your price and they either take it or not, so you’ve got to have an idea of what the going rate is and what else might be going on in town, but it’s worth the work on those $500 night rooms. (I know, the Shatner ads are lame.)

Make sure you also take a look at TripAdvisor.com to get the real lowdown and reviews on a hotel you’re not familiar with.

Best for cars

If you’ve rented a car in the last few years you know this is not an industry that’s up for a Baldrige Awards, but hey, at least rates have gone up. I’ve been playing with a fairly new service called Autoslash.com that finds discounts and applies them for you. Then, if the price drops before your rental date they automatically rebook you at the lower rate.

Creating your Itinerary

Once I book all of my various travel options, I forward the confirmations to a free service called TripIt and they create an online Itinerary for my trip and keep all those confirmations in one place. They also offer an iPhone app that keeps me updated if any flight information changes.

So there you have it, you may not be traveling first class while you’re bootstrapping your start-up, but at least you know you paid less than the guy sitting next to you.

View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

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How to find travel deals on Facebook and Twitter

Oct 7th

Posted by Home Wealth Project in General

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If you’re wary about following a bunch of… keeping abreast of a few experts can be as close to one-stop shopping as you can get using social media.

First shared by TravelNewsFeed on SERVICE_TWITTER
Last shared: Thu Oct 07 12:37:51 GMT 2010 129 Total Shares: 129 Tweets

View full post on Home Wealth Project Riot!

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Get Deals on Internet Marketing Software & Internet Marketing Service Today

Jul 27th

Posted by Home Wealth Project in General

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Below is a huge selction of internet marketing services and internet marketing software to help you generate the lifeblood to any online business….