Yesterday Facebook announced the acquisition of "TagTile". TagTile is focussed on building customer loyalty using a mobile phone application and a cube device that merchants set up in their stores. Customers can earn tags and redeem coupons by tapping their phones against the TagTile cube.
I see several areas of value for Facebook in this acquisition and it clearly shows the direction they're heading. Here a few examples:
1) Metrics. How do merchants measure the success of their Facebook marketing campaigns? TagTile can help track customers and provide this critical information back to marketers.
2) Targeted advertising. Using TagTile, Facebook learns even more about customers and can use that information for better targeted ads.
3) Customer loyalty and retention. Facebook with it's 850 million users is where the customers are. Merchants would love to get access to these customers and find better ways to identify and retain loyal customers. TagFile is one way to achieve this.
4) Coincidentally, the acquisition follows just after the announcement of "Facebook Offers" - a Groupon clone that allows businesses to post deals to Facebook news feeds. This video illustrates the process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B60eo6HcFJg In the video the sales clerk is squinting his eyes at the customer's phone (0:53 min). Clearly, tapping the TagTile device would be more convenient.
As Facebook prepares for the IPO these aspects can provide additional revenue streams. TagTile can provide value for both customers (free stuff) and merchants (more data about customers). I'm curious to see how TagTile will be integrated into the Facebook ecosystem.
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