How Social Networking Drives Location-based Service Adoption
Social networking will continue to drive the adoption of location-based services and should be considered a part of any location-based marketing campaign. With Facebook accounting for one out of every four page views on the web in the United States, people are spending a lot of time networking.
Part of what makes social experiences richer with friends and family is not just knowing “what” they’re doing but “where” they’re doing it. Location-based services go a long way toward facilitating the “where.”
From a personal perspective, many people using location-based services today do so because of the gaming factor — earning badges and winning prizes. Others do so to gain social credibility by letting their friends know that they’re at a concert, cool bar, or trendy restaurant.
Looking at the power of social networking from a business perspective, they’re equally if not more so motivated to have their customers not only checking in to their physical locations, but also sharing these check-ins with their social networks.
The force that drives social networking is the social graph. A social graph consists of everyone that someone is connected to online: friends, family, former classmates, co-workers, and neighbors.
Services like Facebook and Twitter keep this collection of connections centralized and accessible by other applications. When a user creates a social graph, other applications such as Gowalla or Yelp can grab that social graph, and that information can be easily shared across more networks.
