Weekly Ads Can Now Be Fully Social – Introducing SmartCircular For Facebook

Posted on 19 January 2010 by Patrick FlanaganNo Comments

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Meeting shoppers right where they are.  This principle is at the core of ShopLocal’s latest product innovation – the Weekly Ad Facebook App.

Instead of always trying to push and pull user to a specific destination site (e.g., retailer.com), smart retailer today are building out rich and inviting socially enabled experiences within the areas of the web that users spend most of their time within – namely portals and social sites.

Since Facebook is clearly the largest social site in the world with over 350 active users (see the rest of their insane stats below), making sure any given retailer’s brand is well represented within this massive ecosystem is now becoming a requirement.

• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 55 million status updates posted each day
• More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
• The US represents about 30% of total users

So why add weekly ad content (or any other store promotional or deal content for that matter) to a Facebook fan page? The answer is simple. To attract and retain “fans”, retailers must meet the needs of these shoppers.  One of these key needs is to get something in return for their action of becoming a retailer’s “fan”. Namely deals, discounts and coupons.  There is a certain social contract at play and it needs to be upheld.   The weekly ad is a great source of localized promotions and deals that exactly meets the expectation that fans have.

“When a 1,000 “connected consumers” where surveyed in late 2009 about their digital habits and attitudes towards social media marketing, they found that promotions and discounts were primary drivers of “friending” a brand for over a third of social networking users” – recent Razorfish study

So what makes up ShopLocal’s Weekly Ad Facebook App anyways?   Here are a few of the key features:

• Integration of common social Facebook features such as:
  • Like
  • Comment
  • Share
• Ability to browse localized weekly ad content by both categories and brands and sort the results of these by:
  • Popularity
  • Item Title
  • Sale End Date
  • Price
• Rich metrics of all of the user actions
• Multi-channel capabilities that enable retailers to drive traffic either back to their regular weekly ad site and/or retailer.com site
• Geo-target user location identification process that seamlessly determines the user’s nearest store location. It also offers the user a method for changing their system-derived location to a new one at any time
• View an item detail layer complete with the option to view a larger item image

Important Note: This finished, private Facebook app was not paid, approved or directed by Kohl’s.  Rather Kohl’s circular content was merely selected to build and test around by the ShopLocal product development team due to its representative nature.  This weekly ad Facebook app demo is just so be an example of what is possible for any given retailer.  If you would like access to this private beta, all you need to do is simply become “my friend” on Facebook and I will set you up so that you can view this amazing demo app.

This is the "splash" page where the entire weekly ad experience begins. Facebook currently has a really dumb policy in place that prohibits a Flash movie from auto-running. Instead they force a rule that requires that the user to click to activate the flash experience. So this is the ONLY reason why this splash page exists.

Once the user clears the initial hurdle of activating the flash movie, the weekly ad experience comes to life. Right now, the beta app starts with all users viewing the most popular products overall, across all brands and categories.

If a user wants to more details on specific offer, a simple item detail screen is shown which allows the user to potentially buy the item online (at retailer.com), share the item as a link post with their Facebook friends or post a comment. In this case, the user is attempting to leave a comment on a specific item.

Since this user has never interacted with the weekly ad app before, there is a required and Facebook controlled popup that the user must grant the weekly ad app access to some of the personal information. This is a very standard popup that happens in nearly all Facebook apps. But all the same, it is hurdle #2 that Facebook forces us all to jump over.

Once the user has granted the weekly ad app access to their profile information, the comment can be posted. Notice for example the thumbnail image of the user now appears vs. the anonymous user image.

As a nice little feature, within the item detail area for an item, a larger image view is easily accessible.

As an alternate to browsing by category (which is the default method), the user can also choose to browse by brands at any time.

If a user decides that they want to share a specific item of interest as a "link" with their Facebook friends, they can very easily do so from within the weekly ad app. They can even write a comment to help provide some context of why they are sharing this "link".

And finally, here is how a "link" that is shared appears on the user's own wall. This is the #1 action that can cause viral spread of a weekly ad offer, since now all of the user's friends are now going to see this story within their news feed and be able to like, comment and re-share it.

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