Facebook Offers came out of nowhere as a free alternative to things like Groupon and Living Social. Available for “some brands” (I’m not sure yet who is included/excluded), posting an offer is as easy as posting any other piece of content through your Facebook page.

The process, from both the brand’s and customer’s perspective is pretty simple:

1. Create an offer
2. Choose a number limit
3. Choose an expiration date
4. Set terms and conditions
5. Post to your feed

Offers show up on your fan page as well as the news feeds of your fans. Fans can then click “Get Offer” and have the voucher emailed to them which they can take to your resort for redemption.

Three Positives
There are a few reason I like Facebook offers:

1. Two-click sharing give your offers the chance to be viral
2. Free to post, no massive fees like Groupon or Living Social
3. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a discount, can be adding value (free ___ when you purchase ____)

The redemption process could use some work, but with the email address as the unique identifier, it does give you the chance (or an excuse) to collect the email address of those that redeem.

The Negatives
The big negative I see is this: there’s no easy way, aside from posting dozens of versions, to make offers date-specific. I think, for the most part, it takes many, but certainly not all, possibilities of lodging and/or lift tickets out of the equation.

Possible Uses
I see a couple of solid types of uses. First, something similar to a loss-leader on things like lodging to get people to your resort or, second, a bonus offer where the user gets something extra for coming and paying for something else. For lift tickets, I don’t see a way to make a simple offer that would last the whole season but still pinpoint slow days. Instead, I see this as a good way for last-minute offers for dates sometime within the next week once you have a good idea of what the weather will be like so you don’t give a huge discount on a powder day.

So, a few examples might be:

• Get a free lunch voucher with a lift ticket purchase
• 40% off early season lodging
• $45 weekday lift ticket next week only (posted on a Saturday or Sunday)

Or partner offers with other businesses/pages to cross promote:

• Get a 50% off lunch voucher to ____ and a $45 midweek lift ticket next week
• 40% off early season lodging and a buy 1 get 1 coffee at _____

With tagging other businesses or pages built into the Facebook platform, I see lots of possibilities for small partnerships to leverage each other’s fans..

Will They Redeem
When SimplyZesty claimed a hotel made over $1,000,000 in 24 hours using Facebook Offers, they missed (perhaps intentionally to have a better headline) one little detail: they were measuring those that clicked “get offer” not those that redeemed it. While the numbers were impressive, because no money is being handed over up-front like Groupon or Living Social, the big question for Facebook Offers going forward is how many people will end up redeeming their voucher.

Facebook’s Motives
I think part of the motivation for Facebook to launch offers is to entice more pages to pay for Reach Generator to push something more than just a status update out to more and more fans that wouldn’t normally see it because of EdgeRank. Even without Reach Generator, I think these offers could be a nice tool to have at your disposal.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.