There’s now an extra incentive for owners of businesses like pubs, restaurants, hotels, coffee shops and beauty salons to claim their venue on Foursquare, the geo-location check-in and recommendation service.
The one million businesses that have verified and claimed their listing now have access to a new messaging service called ‘Local Updates’. The marketing tools on Foursquare are now even more powerful. Venue owners can already create their own presence on Foursquare and set up offers for customers known as Specials. All these tools are free although I suspect that in future Foursquare will charge for the service or aspect of it.
Using local updates businesses can send messages to Foursquare users pinpointed by a user’s check-in frequency, geographic location, and type of businesses he or she has ‘liked’ in the past.
Local Updates are posted into the Friends feed and could be used in a number of ways. For example, to highlight a Foursquare Special or to promote an event.
For customers, Local Updates are an easy way to keep up with news and offers from places they frequent.
Context and personalisation as previously stated will play a huge part in the future of marketing and this development is very much in keeping with that. It will be interesting to see how users of Foursquare respond. Will they enjoy the targeted content or see it as being creepy? My guess would be on the former.
For advice on how your business can use Foursquare to attract customers please get in touch.