What is Foursquare?

Foursquare is a location based service that is part social networking tool, part city guide and part game. Intended for use on smartphones, users “check in” at various locations and can win virtual designations, prizes and points for visiting locations or doing interesting things. Foursquare also uses the GPS feature found in smartphones to pinpoint a location. Like Twitter, users connect with each other, communicate their statuses and compete for honors.  For example, a user that checks-in the most at a location is declared the Foursquare “Mayor” and given a virtual badge; other badges are awarded based on the use of location tagging and points are also awarded for check ins. The result is an addictive game with many hooks.

How Business Can Use Foursquare

To paraphrase a recent Advertising Age blog post, Foursquare helps businesses Build an Army of Hyper-Local Mobile Connected Advocates. But that’s not all: while Twitter enables users to talk about a specific business, Foursquare encourages users to act. Checking in, offering business specific Tips, suggesting To Do’s and other Foursquare-related activities requires users to visit the business which should result in an increase in business. Furthermore, Foursquare offers businesses the ability to learn more about their customers by monitoring not only the recency and frequency of visits, but also comments. So far, Foursquare has been used primarily by B2C businesses like bars, restaurants and coffee shops as a loyalty builder, but I’m sure that there are many more uses.

While you may have to skip through a few slides to get to the useful stuff, here’s a  slide show on What You Need to Know About Foursquare from We Are Social:

Why I Like Foursquare

So far, I really like Foursquare for a number of reasons. First, it puts the “social” into social media, by connecting people and encouraging human interaction. Second, it’s fun. Foursquare encourages people to visit new places and make recommendations. The tagging feature that awards points for tagging locations reminds me of some sort of geocache and it intrigues me. Third, Foursquare benefits users and business locations alike. Users have fun competing for titles, badges and points, not to mention meeting new friends. Businesses benefit from attracting more customers and learning more about them. After getting my feet wet, I’m looking forward to using this application more and finding new ways to use it to benefit business – and have some fun in the process.

The Winner: Foursquare vs. Twitter

Sorry to disappoint you, but I think that it’s too early to determine if there is a winner between these two applications, or even if there is a contest. So far, it seems that we are comparing an Apple to an Orange. To me, Twitter is much more of a utility; it facilitates real time communication between people and in many ways has laid much of the social media groundwork. It’s the innovator with millions of users that continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Foursquare is an interesting application that on the surface seems to offer much more direct value to business. Granted, if you operate a gasket manufacturer in a non-urban area it may not be all that helpful, but for many other businesses it may offer a much more significant impact. Targeted toward the Twitter demographic, Foursquare seems more like a Twitter enhancement than a competitor.

Bill Rowland