For those of you business owners who view FourSquare as a relatively niche market, you should consider the application’s impact on larger online giants. 

To breakdown how FourSquare can help your business, some beneficial information that the platform logs is:

  • most recent customers
  • frequency of check-ins
  • breakdown by gender
  • user feedback

The basic idea behind your business gaining from it is through rewarding customer loyalty. By using “Specials” you will further engage your loyal customers by offering prizes or discounts for checking in to your location.

With a fairly small market size of nearly 3 million users, FourSqaure on its own may not be in the hands of the majority of your typical customers. However, one must consider the usage statistics of individuals who are on it:

  •  94% check in to 10 or more venues
  • 79% check in to 25 or more venues
  • 57% check in to 50 or more venues
  • 77% check in 30 or more times in each month

Additionally, after realizing the various benefits of geolocation, the ultimate social network, Facebook recently released its own location based service called “Places”. This application allows users to check in to registered businesses and tag friends who they are with. Facebook’s 500,000,000+ users will see information about their friends’ check ins on their newsfeed. The most indicative statistic of geolocation’s quickly spreading awareness is Foursquare experiencing its largest amount of user signups just shortly after Facebook’s release of “Places”.

If Facebook discovering the potential of geolocation wasn’t enough, rest assured that the world’s largest search engine, Google is exploring location based service. Having already its own feature called “Places”, Google recognizes the benefits behind providing as much information about locations as possible and currently offers “Google Tags” within “Places”. This leaves something to be gained by business owners, as it allows users to view select features about the location with simply scrolling over a yellow “tag” (no clicking through to the website required). They look to expand “Places” into a more interactive API using the “Check-In” feature.

Though Google has yet to announce the release date of a Places API, the “Check-In” has clearly been identified by these online giants as a feature worth pursuing. The intense user engagement displayed through geolocation creates something all business owners should strive for: a passionate consumer market segment.

Author: George Irish, Strategis