What is Facebook Places?
Let’s start with the basics. Facebook Places is basically a mobile app feature that allows you to share where you are located and see where your friends are physically located. You can choose to “check in” virtually with Facebook Places when you visit your local coffee shop or your local dentist, immediately communicating to your friends where you are. After checking in, you can leave a comment and see others that have checked in at that same place.
Privacy restrictions will limit who will see your comments and check ins.
For now only Facebook for iPhone and mobile phones capable of viewing HTML5 webpages can use Facebook Places.
See also: [intlink id="1977" type="post"]How to add your Medical Practice to Facebook Places[/intlink]
Late in the game, no innovation from Facebook…yet!
First of all, this is a “me too” feature for Facebook–they are kind of late in the location game that has been playing out for some time now. However, copycats can often have huge impact on an industry, and this is definitely going to be another example of that. Yelp! and Foursquare will probably witness Facebook Places ripping off their innovations with massive success.
What’s missing right now are more incentives for people to check in. Foursquare has created certain incentives based on recognition awards. It will be interesting to see if Facebook will also copy that model or perhaps go beyond simple virtual awards.
Healthcare industry impact: Yelp and Foursquare times a hundred
The easiest way to see what’s coming is to take a look at Yelp. Yelp can be described as the most trusted and valued social network for user generated reviews. Many medical practices, especially dental offices receive a lot of attention and reviews from their patients on Yelp. In contrast to the physician rating sites you often see on Google, Yelp reviews are taken more seriously because of their filtering algorythm and “peer review” process. To this date, Yelpers have written over 12 million local reviews, over 85% of them rating a business 3 stars or higher
The power of a social media network is a function of total number of members and the value of each member’s investment into that network. Yelpers on average invest a good deal into Yelp with dozens or even hundreds of reviews and check ins. But its member base is still a fraction of that of Facebook with a more narrow demographic. Facebook is the King of social networks. They have a crazy large member base and its members invest massively into the network with both time and content.
Social media networks benefit from what we call “network effects”–each new member increases membership value for all existing members. Much like how being the first and only owner of a fax machine has practically zero value, but your fax machine increases in value for each new person that invests in one.
The same network effects will give immense power to Facebook Places, more power than Yelp or Foursquare ever had. The value of Yelp suffered somewhat in less populated and less popular places. I expect that Facebook easily will perform better in these areas.
What can your medical group expect of Facebook Places today?
To be honest with you, the current version is fairly boring and without any exciting features.
For now, Facebook Places is limited to simply enabling your patients to check in and leave comments for their friends to see (depending on their Privacy settings). As you can imagine, this will probably only have a real impact on your practice in extreme cases.
What can the healthcare industry expect of Facebook Places tomorrow?
What we see today is arguably a very small baby step by Facebook. This is new to them, and with their massive size they want make sure their APIs and the technical backbone is solid.
No matter what you think of today’s feature set, you cannot ignore their mammoth 500 million membership. Compare that to Foursquare’s 3 million members. Whatever Facebook will do, their impact is going to be massive!
Future predictions of impact on doctors and other healthcare providers
- I believe we will see an adoption of a Yelp-like review functionality in the future. Possibly with the feature of medical practices being able to respond to these user generated reviews/comments.
- I believe we will see several location-based marketing opportunities for medical practices. For example, when a Facebook user does a virtual check-in to your practice, or perhaps a check-in somewhere in the neighborhood, they could receive a short communication message/special offer from your practice.
Right now, a medical group can only advertise their Facebook Place in the same fashion as they can advertise their Facebook Page. - I believe we will see some amazing innovations by integrating the open Facebook Places API with medical apps, patient portals, [intlink id="110" type="page"]medical practice websites[/intlink], etc. We might find private practices having a “check in” button on their website in the same fashion as we use the “Like” button today. Foursquare has confirmed that they are implementing the Facebook Places API to their service–allowing Foursquare check ins to be pushed to Facebook.
- I believe we will see much tighter integration between your [intlink id="116" type="page"]medical practice Facebook Page[/intlink] and Facebook Places than what we see today.
“Like” it or not, location-based social networks are now going mainstream and are here to stay.
As with everything else in social media–there is no way for medical practices to opt out. Your [intlink id="20" type="page"]online presence[/intlink] is created with you or without you.
Your next step: [intlink id="1977" type="post"]How to add your Medical Practice to Facebook Places[/intlink]
Most of this dialog between physician practices and patients raises potential privacy issues. What applies to most businesses is restricted by privacy law. But I’m with you in how cool it could be.
Thanks for your comment, Dr. Vartabedian.
I agree with you. As if Facebook doesn’t have enough privacy issues to deal with already. Adding the location layer is going to increase the scope of privacy challenges quite a lot.
Being the optimist I am, I think Facebook has at least somewhat learned from their past privacy mistakes. During the Facebook Places setup process, the user is given a couple of privacy choices (if I remember correctly).
Without any real incentives to participate in Facebook Places most users will stay away from it, but I believe Facebook is going to make sure that there will be several ways to be rewarded for being part of it in the near future.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this will play out.
Interesting take on potential of Facebook places in Healthcare. Once the power of ‘network effects’ can be harnessed, everything else can simply follow the trail outlined here.
And i don’t see a large hurdle with ‘privacy issues’. Like the recent (kinda) related document/ regulatory alert from FDA on the Facebook share widget tells us, there is a certain leeway in many matters.
I think there is a reason why people review dentists on Yelp more than regular physicians, which has a lot to do with the patient not wanting to share what type of clinic they are checking into. I understand that the sheer numbers of people on Facebook means more people are going to be checking into doctor’s offices, but do you really think someone going to an STD clinic, or a cancer center, or a psychiatry office, or a drug rehab center, or a physical therapy session (when their employer doesn’t know they have a bad back) or any myriad number of places, are actually going to want to publicly proclaim that information? There are many, many reasons why patients want to protect that information, the least of which is simply their privacy, not to mention issues related to work, health insurance, medical claims and more. I would caution people to think twice about sharing this type of check-in.
Hi Jessica,
Personally I agree with you, I find it hard to believe that people are going to be “public” about certain doctor appointments. That said, there are so many specialties that does not have these “sensitive” issues. And people are sharing so much these days, way more than I ever expected. I don’t see this change any time soon.
When they time comes when we are somehow “rewarded” for checking in, I believe that many will warm up to the thought of being “public”. Foursquare largely attracted the younger crowed. Facebook Places is going to attract all ages.
I just came to think of the fact that the fastest growing segment on Facebook is Women 55+. Things change fast!
I was going to write basically this exact comment, but Jessica beat me to it and I couldn’t have said it better myself. First, find me a large portion of Facebook users that will use Places. Next, find me a significant amount of those that are willing to tell the world when they are at the doctor…any doctor…much less one where they are having an “embarrassing” condition being treated. It just doesn’t make sense why someone would do that especially in light of the fact that there are no incentives.
If I knew I was going to get better care for having used Facebook Places then maybe, maybe, I might think about it. It’s a moot point, because it won’t provide better care.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for your thoughts! Without repeating what I wrote to Jessica, here are some more ideas.
Your comment is pretty much exactly my own initial reaction to the idea of geo location and healthcare. Personally, it’s in my very own nature to be private about my life as much as possible. However, I have to admit that Facebook more than any other technology has managed to move my personal privacy boundaries to a frightening degree.
Looking back and seeing how the concept of privacy has changed so incredible much in just a couple of years, it’s not that hard to think that this may not just suddenly stop. There will be more “innovation”/pushing boundaries in this area, much more.
It’s easy for us to quickly mention medical specialties that treat more sensitive issues. I don’t see a future for several such specialties on Facebook Places. We talked about this in HealthCamp San Diego, and STD clinics were mentioned as one of those examples. What was interesting was that a person that daily interacts with high-school kids/college students was telling us others that some actually do tell their friends about STD clinic visits. In certain groups it’s a badge of honor. Insanity.
My point is that it’s more fruitful to stop think of where geo location+social networks won’t work, and think of all the medical specialties, healthcare providers, organizations where this technology will play a role.
You bring up the most important part, incentives. As I wrote in the article, this is one of the most important parts that’s missing in today’s initial version of Facebook Places. I’m actually currently writing another blog about this subject. Game dynamics.
Usage of Facebook Places will explode. It will be a significant mass that use geo location, big enough to make it worth while for healthcare providers to participate. Facebook has stated that about 150 mill (world wide) access FB on their mobile devices, and that they are twice as active as other users. Not all have GPS today, but you know where the trend is taking us.
I will even go so far that to say geo location/Facebook Places WILL improve healthcare. Obviously, we’re not talking about improving medical procedures, but with game dynamics I think we will see improved outcomes and long-term treatments for many conditions. My next blog will discuss more about this.
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Nice post.
Hi Jessica,
Personally I agree with you, I find it hard to believe that people are going to be “public” about certain doctor appointments. That said, there are so many specialties that does not have these “sensitive” issues. And people are sharing so much these days, way more than I ever expected. I don’t see this change any time soon.
When they time comes when we are somehow “rewarded” for checking in, I believe that many will warm up to the thought of being “public”. Foursquare largely attracted the younger crowed. Facebook Places is going to attract all ages.
I just came to think of the fact that the fastest growing segment on Facebook is Women 55+. Things change fast!