What’s so great about Foursquare?
If you haven’t used Foursquare yet (or even heard of it for that matter), here’s your chance to get caught-up.
Foursquare is a location service-based social network ‘game’ for your smart phones. What it does in effect is to tell you where your friends are, to tell your friends where you are and to add a little fun to going out in the evening. It’s a cocktail of Facebook and Google Latitude with a little added zest of Twitter.
It works on the principle that users can check-in at their favourite locations and also submit tips and notes about that location. Say there’s a sale on at your local farmers’ market and you’d like to tell your friends. You can check in using Foursquare and add in a tip to let others know about the amazingly fresh and half price asparagus.
Foursquare is also a great tool for businesses. By checking-in enough times, you have the chance to become the Mayor of a certain location. This means that you are the individual who has frequented that particular location the most (so far). This nifty little feature has resulted in some ‘turf-wars’ between rival Mayors. But what does this mean for your business? It means that people are battling over who represents that business. These Mayors are attributing themselves with your company or product for all their friends to see. They have, in short, become your brand ambassadors.
Many businesses recognise the appeal that these brand ambassadors yield and have started to capitalise on this. Some offer free drinks, discounted services or products to their Mayors for word-of-mouth (viral) marketing and customer loyalty.
So if your business could benefit from having customers fight over who likes it best, Foursquare could potentially be very rewarding to look into.
Blog Post written by Erika Clegg
Category: Social 2 comments »
July 7th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
I recently met a restaurant owner in Ipswich (I’d tweeted about a bad experience there and one of his friends sent him my phone number) and we talked about promoting his business.
One of his restaurants is exceptionally successful (Its a location and uniqueness thing combined) the other is less successful (I think its less visible too). He’s gone to the trouble of setting up a facebook page for fans, but I suggested he get into foursquare.
Explaining how foursquare works for a location based business is difficult, especially as it seems so trivial and to some dangerous when you’re telling the world where you are. However it is an extremely powerful tool for businesses like this especially when you’re aiming for a large customer turnover.
The best example I have come across is Domino’s Pizza, who really make twitter their own, starting in Chicago. Ramon de Leon set out to find customers talking on twitter about Domino’s, both postively and negatively. The postive tweeters were encouraged, the negative ones listened to, compensated, showered with offers and turned into advocates.
Now Domino’s has found fourquare in a big way, and if you try out foursquare near any major town (Chelmsford, for example) you’ll see they are offering the mayor a free pizza on a Wednesday.
Not only does foursquare reinforce where you are and put you ‘on the map’ in peoples’ minds, it allows you to interact with your customers in relation to where they are, building a loyal following in ways based on opt-in customer choice and interest. I think its a great tool.
July 8th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
The only downside is that foursquare has next to no support in the UK!