Foursquare is a social media platform that you can use for your own personal use or as an effective strategy of advertising your business. Many businesses large and small are using Foursquare and other social media in order to keep their customers up-to-date on events and to reach out to potential customers.

What Is Foursquare?

Foursquare is a location-based social media application. It uses maps of local areas to promote social interaction and also includes games. Users can utilize the Foursquare application on their mobile devices to ‘check in’ at businesses and locations they are patronizing. Foursquare is free for users and the trend for ‘checking in’ is still growing. Users can also add a business they frequent if it is not already listed. For each check-in, Foursquare users will earn points, accumulate badges, and ultimately become the ‘Mayor’ of different businesses based on their check-in frequency.

How Does Foursquare Help Grow a Business?

Foursquare, like other social media outlets, can help bring a business to the forefront of the target audience. In many cases, the business itself does not have to be a very active participant in using Foursquare to successfully use it for promotion. As more people are proactive about using the application, businesses are reaping the rewards of word-of-mouth advertising.

Customers do a lot of your promotional work for your business on Foursquare as they can leave tips for other people patronizing your business. This can help to build your reputation in the online community. The more people share their location at your business, the more work will spread.

Effective Foursquare Business Strategies

There are a number of ways to use this social media application to improve your business and grow your customer base. Here is a look at some of the common concepts business have been using to promote the products or services:

Race for Mayor – users of Foursquare can hold the distinct honor of becoming the Mayor of your establishment based on how often they check-in at your location. To provide extra incentives for customers to seek the position of Mayor, a business can offer specials including free merchandise, gift cards, or exclusive discounts to whoever is crowned mayor.

Monthly Foursquare Events – through your Foursquare account, a business can offer exclusive deals or events that are only available to users of the application. Not only can this increase the interest in a business, it can also help encourage people to learn more about Foursquare itself thereby growing your potential audience.

Customer Incentives – there are many simple but effective marketing campaigns you can provide to your customers through Foursquare that offer incentives for checking-in that can be promoted through other social medial applications including Facebook.

Since Foursquare is an ideal way to make direct contact with your target audience, it is worth the time to learn more about the many ways it can be used to market your products or services in real-time. Consistency and active participation are the two most important ingredients in a successful Foursquare marketing strategy for any sized business.

Ready to try it for your business? Sign up here. Would you like a hand setting up your account and brainstorming some other social media ideas? Let the experts at IntelliSites and Burst Marketing help.

It goes without saying that Google is a force to be reckoned with on the internet (and a frequent topic of discussion at IntelliSites’ Albany Web Design Blog). It’s an enormous corporation with tons of resources and lots of creative minds contributing to its big picture. And it comes up with some pretty amazing new concepts. But did you know that the Google folks have worked on a number of technologies that never quite took off? I caught an article by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land the other day that celebrated some of Google’s “failed attempts.” Here’s my take on a couple of Google’s best worst ideas.

Google Wave – This was invented as a form of communication that blended the best elements of email, instant messages, and wikis. It could have taken over as a new and improved version of email. Even though Google Wave didn’t make it, I think its debut pointed out that email as a form of communication has some widespread issues and that there are things that new technology could do to make it better. Wave’s short life also suggests that email is so widely adopted that even with its flaws, people don’t know how to make sense of a replacement for it.

SearchWiki – This function allowed people to tailor their list of results when they used Google’s regular search engine. You could delete sites from your results and rearrange the order of results so you’d have an ideal list the next time you made the same search. But somehow, in this era of customization, people didn’t like changing their search results. Do people feel there’s a sanctity to Google results? Do people feel that Google knows what’s relevant to their searches better than they, themselves, do? Based on how this idea flopped, I guess so.

Dodgeball – Dodgeball is the ancestor of what we now know as Foursquare. (For real. As Sullivan’s article mentions, the guy who invented Foursquare used to work for Google). Based on Foursquare’s success, it seems like sometimes, Google would benefit from sticking it out with a product before killing it. Google’s attempt at spreading Dodgeball also makes it clear that Google is ahead of its time in many ways. They were thinking about location-based stuff even before everybody had smartphones.

So maybe the world just wasn’t ready for these “flops” when they came out.  And maybe cousins of Google Wave, SearchWiki, and Google’s other technologies will make someone else rich someday.