Foursquare: Getting Friendly With Area Businesses
It’s not unusual to see a Gen Yer glued to her Blackberry, tweeting while walking (warning: not advised), updating her Facebook status and checking in at every stop along the way.
While only a year and some change old, Foursquare has been creating serious buzz both here at Mr Youth and in the tech worlds, with talks of some big players eyeing the game for a possible sale. While the Foursquare user base is growing, the start up is making moves to become more business-friendly.
Foursquare recently added several features to increase its user-friendliness to area businesses. Here’s a run-down of some of the recent updates:
Management Ownership- Foursquare now allows businesses to ‘claim’ their venues on Foursquare to better ‘engage their increasingly mobile customers with specials‘, and track how each venue is performing on foursquare thanks to analytics. The site also gives sample engagement rewards to drive return visits (i.e. mayorship specials, wildcard specials).
Management Stats- By claiming their business on Foursquare, owners can also gather the following real-time stats:
- most recent visitors
- most frequent visitors
- times of day people check in
- total number of unique visitors
So why does this matter? Other than getting a free ice cream or the prestige of becoming the mayor of your favorite lunch spot, Foursquare is giving businesses the tools to shape their social media profile to a world of tech-savvy customers. While review sites have reshaped how customers find and frequent local businesses, Foursquare is giving businesses the tools to shape their perception in the eyes of ever-elusive consumers.
So while local businesses and restaurants catch up with Foursquare’s new offerings, I’ll continue to work on my hard-earned mayorships.
Tags: foursquare, local businesses, mayorship
This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 4:34 pm and is filed under New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
