On April 13 2012, Facebook rolled out Offers in limited beta to a handful of business pages in the US. The proposition as it stands is to enable businesses post offers for free on their Fb pages. These offers would then appear in the Newsfeed of all the respective Fans.

Here’s how it works:

While earlier attempts by Facebook to enter the deal space have not been so successful, ‘Facebook Offers’ does have the potential to lure businesses away from Deal Sites.

1. It is FREE! Facebook does not charge businesses (pages) to offer deals. Typically a deal site charges 20-50% of the ticket value from the merchant. Businesses can thus save on the cut they used to offer to the deal sites. This means better profits for merchants and better deals for customers.
2. Highly Targeted: Facebook Offers would appear in the NewsFeedof only those people who have “Liked” the respective page. Thus the approach is highly targeted, focusing only on those who are customers of the brand or who are atleast interested in the brand.
3. Higher Virality: Deal Sites typically have social share buttons to enable people to share deals and consequently promote them. (It is another thing though that hardly anybody uses them.) Here Facebook is in itself the social sharing platform. 
4. More Audience: Currently, Facebook does not restrict offer redemption to Fans only. So if the Fan of a page has shared an offer-his ‘friends’ , ‘friends of friends’ and  ‘everyone’ can potentially avail the offer (based on the Fan’s Post settings). Though on the one hand, it may not be useful in terms of improving the number of Likes on the page, on the other hand however, it helps in expanding the market for the offer.
5. Spam Control: Daily Deal e-mails form an important part of deal site marketing. Merchants do pay a premium to feature on these mails. Most of these mails however either end up in a spam folder or are deleted by users. Facebook Offers are limited to Fans…so as long as merchants keep posting relevant offers, they will keep generating ‘Likes’.

However, it is too early to say whether Facebook Offers will sound the death knell for the Deal Industry or not. Competition brings out the best in a person and a competitor like Facebook would definitely compel the Deal Industry to look for more innovative ways of doing business. Maybe it’s time they started looking beyond funding and investment! 

Shilpi Choudhury is a Blogger and Inbound Marketer at DiscountPandit, a deal search engine . She blogs at Discountpandit.com/blog