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Hey Laura Roeder here. By popular demand, I’m making you a video letting you know what I think about the new Facebook deals and the impact it’ll have on the small business. So I am a very excited about Facebook deals.

If you don’t know what Facebook deals are, that’s the new feature where you can be in a working mode of business, pop up on Facebook on your phone, your Blackberry or your iPhone, check in, say I’m here I’m here at Peter’s Coffee Shop and then you get some special discount for being there. You get the free coffee, you get the 20 percent off or a lot of them are doing the donation thing or donating a dollar to this cause.

So if you’ve heard of tracking services like Foursquare or Gowalla, it’s the same thing but it’s on Facebook. But here’s why it’s exciting that it’s on Facebook. People use Facebook. Facebook has achieved that critical mass and that critical mass is so important for both users and for marketing.

Something that tell people a lot is don’t worry about keeping up with the latest and greatest social media site because as a business, you don’t care about it until the audience is there, right? Unless your audience is super techies that are the first early adopters of everything, you don’t really care about the technology until everybody is using it because for your business, it’s like you don’t want to advertise on the TV show that ten people are watching.

You want to advertise on a TV show that your million customers are watching and the million people or way more than that, are already on Facebook. The problem with Foursquare is, it all works but it’s sort of useless unless everybody is already on Foursquare. You can check in and your friends can see but unless your friends are on Foursquare, they can’t see it and not that many people are on Foursquare.

It’s really hard to achieve this critical mass. Facebook has clearly emerged as the leader that everybody is on right now. Who knows what’ll happen in the future? But this is really important for business because that means, when somebody checks in their friends actually do see that they’re checking in because their friends actually are on Facebook.

Facebook has really made it their mission to become the social glue of the Internet and they’re really doing it. You’re starting to see a lot of sites that are having Facebook comments as their comments instead of blog comments. That means everything you’re doing online is interfacing with Facebook is being shown to your friends. And now they’re hoping that everything you’re doing offline will be shown on your Facebook profile and will be shown to your Facebook friends as well.

So for businesses, I think this is a really exciting opportunity. I think it’s much more exciting honestly. I’d love all my web startups out there but they just haven’t achieved that critical mass. I think it’s much more exciting than something like Foursquare. So if you are a small local business I don’t think you need to jump in just yet. Keep your eye on how it’s being used, keep your eye on what your customers want and what your customers are talking about.

But as this gets rolled out in more mainstream, I do think it’s a great option for local businesses to really encourage word of mouth marketing.

So I’m Laura Roeder, that’s my take on Facebook deal.

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