Coupons coming to a Facebook News Feed near you

Coupon-junkies can soon skip the newspaper and instead get their fix from the News Feed — no manual clipping required.

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Facebook has partially turned on its Offers program, a new initiative that lets brands and businesses disperse discounts and promotions throughout the social network. Brand fans can simply click to digitally clip the offers from their News Feeds.

Here’s how the program works: Local businesses and brands can create offers — not to be confused with deals of the Groupon variety — from their Facebook Pages, and then push those discounts out to the folks that “like” their Pages. You, the Facebook user, are greeted with offers from the Pages you “like” in your News Feed. You can click “Get Offer” to claim — a.k.a. clip — the promotion, and Facebook will follow-up with an e-mail that you’ll need to show to redeem the discount.

So say, for instance, you “like” Joe’s Java on Facebook. Should your coffee spot post a discount, like $1 off your next latte, you would find that offer in your News Feed, click the “Get Offer” button to claim it, check your e-mail, and then head off to Joe’s to present your electronic coupon. You can also share the offer with your Facebook friends.

Of course we’re talking about Facebook here, so be wary of one little catch: For every offer you claim, a story is posted to your Timeline (profile), though you can adjust the settings to limit who sees this activity.

As with any new Facebook feature, we expect a mixed reaction from Facebookers. There’s bound to be vocal group of users who hate the idea of coupons in their News Feeds, and a crowd of happy campers anxious to save a few bucks at their favorite haunts.

Facebook first announced its new Offers program in late February when it revealed its reworked advertising products. The product is in beta, meaning that only a select group of businesses can currently run offers through Facebook.

“Facebook has been rolling out Offers since fMC and it’s now available in Beta in Japan, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. A handful of U.S. clients also have the ability to run offers, we’re told.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B60eo6HcFJg

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Photo credit: sdc2027/Flickr

[via The Verge]