Leading travel, location and lifestyle social networking site WAYN.com (Where Are You Now?) launches a third party whitelabel service allowing partners to plug into a 13.5 million member global community. The announcement is made this week at the e-Business Academy in Lillehammer, Norway.

WAYN revealed that selected partners will be able to deliver own-branded versions of WAYN’s unique location-based online community.

The whitelabelling proposition enables third parties to deliver location-based search results, offering their users the ability to see who’s where, research locations, explore profiles, view photos, trips and reviews, all based on their whereabouts.

Social networking is known for strong user engagement, high repeat traffic and retention; by providing this whitelabel opportunity WAYN looks to provide traditional websites with an opportunity to gain an instantly involved community, without building from scratch.

WAYN can offer options ranging from full whitelabel services, through to plug-in widgets to help other forms of e-business gain from the strengths of social networking.

The aim is to help location-centric entities maximise the attraction of their offering through people and user generated content. Retailers such as flight operators and hotel sites will also be able to reduce dropoff and encourage their users to interact post-purchase.

On average, WAYN users spend 16 minutes on site per visit, return twice per month on average, and view approximately 30 pages per session. The standard ecommerce transactional site would receive 5 page views per user and fewer repeat visits from consumers.

“We have the world’s biggest location based social network. People use WAYN to see who’s where, to ask strangers what to do in their city, to find out who’ll be coming to their town, and to socialise on a literally global scale” comments Matt Jerwood, WAYN’s director of business development “By opening up the WAYN service to others we aim to initiate partnerships which will result in engagement on non-community sites and non-traditional distribution of the community through innovative and open minded companies.”