Foursquare has been garnering a lot of action and as a business owner it is time to pay attention. It is a mix of social networks with real life gaming mixed in all done on a free downloadable smartphone application. Think of Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and Google Local Maps mixed together in a super cocktail and you have foursquare.
Users check into places when they arrive and can offer tips to other users to get the most out of the business. Primarily focused on restaurants, bars and nightclubs in the beginning, more and more categories such as retail stores and salons can add their business locations, called venues and benefit from this app. These geosocial apps that allow people to refer your business to friends hold tremendous value and bring the type of business to your door that can’t be bought with traditional marketing.
Will foursquare provide the ROI you need? In short, yes! It is free, it is generating tons of buzz, the target audience is the hardest to market to, ie young, affluent, disposable income, tech savvy. The best part may be that since the ability to claim your business is so new on foursquare, the chance that your competition has started already is close to ZERO. So take action on this now, it takes less than 5 minutes and start creating new loyalty and possibly swiping some customers from the other guy.
To get listed and claim your business on foursquare, you first must sign up from the website with your own individual profile. You must upload a photo for your personal profile and please resist the urge to upload a logo at this point.
Next, search for your business. If you are in a metro area there is a good chance your business is already listed. If it does not come up in search, select “add things” at the top of the navigation menu.
1) Click “add a venue”, and enter the name of your business.
2) Enter the address. Use abbreviations for streets and avenues. Spell out cities and use standard abbreviated notations for states in CAPS.
500 State St. Boston, MA 02115
3) Enter your business’s phone number and Twitter ID. Twitter isn’t required but it will really boost your business’s potential with foursqure
4) Enter tags/ keywords related to your business. TIP: Add the city and state of your business as a Tag. It won’t matter on the website version but it does when people are searching on their phones.
5) You are all set adding your business now you need to download the foursquare App on a smartphone. (Palm Pre, iPhone, Blackberry or Android) Log-in and “Check In” to your business. Check in again the next day and you are the “Mayor” of your business.
They have also started full analytics graphing similar to your own website stats, offering window clings to let your customers know you can be found on FourSquare and the ability to add specials and communicate with your loyal customers.
With foursquare customers, as all of new customers from social networks, you need to add them your list. Social networks provide a great opportunity to get customers that become apostles for your business, but the list is owned by the social network and as with Twitter in recent months, it can become diluted as more users and businesses join. When you build your own list through text marketing, the user reads your message without the clutter of social networks that grow to large for messages to become heard anymore. Foursquare is far from that point as of now and you should use it to your advantage for sales and text marketing list building opportunities.