Why You Should Check Out Check-Ins
June 15, 2010 by Jenni
Foursquare, the location-based social media platform taking the Internet by storm, is averaging 10+ check-ins per second. Co-founder Dennis Crowley expects the website to hit 1 million check-ins daily by mid-June.
Brands that use the network to their advantage stand to gain increased exposure and consumer loyalty. In addition to collecting badges and “mayor” titles at locations around town, users are also encouraged to share tips and recommendations with others. Insider advice like “try the passion fruit juice” and “50 cent oysters during happy hour” equate to free advertising for companies.
Take a cue from Starbucks and reward these brand ambassadors with incentives. Since the debut of their nationwide mayor promotion ($1 off Frappuccinos), the coffee house has experienced a 40 percent increase of check-ins week-to-week. The following are a few examples of best practices:
- Golden Corral – Mayors eat free once a day, and in some cases, are entered in a contest to win a free iPad.
- UNC Charlotte – The first university to host a Foursquare promotion on campus, students receive free t-shirts for checking in at basketball games and other school events.
- Miss Shirley’s Café – At this busy Baltimore restaurant, mayors never wait in line.
If you are interested in integrating Foursquare into your business, do it in a way that reflects your company’s personality – and be sure your customers know. Whether it’s coupons, freebies or a pass to jump the line, your generosity just might earn you a shout-out on Twitter.
Photo source: @maxwellzorick
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'); ?>Tags: Blogging, Branding, Costa DeVault, Facebook, Foursquare, Listening, PR, Public Relations, Social Media, Twitter
June 16th, 2010 at 11:34 am
I think your idea for how businesses can best leverage foursquare is great. However, I foresee foresquare suffering the same fate that I predicted that Twitter would.
Earlier this year, Pete Cashmore with Mashable predicted that foursquare would be the big social media app of 2010. I like Pete Cashmore because he’s dreamy (I’ve met him in person a couple of times, so trust me on this one) and after seeing all the check-ins start to pop up on Facebook, I decided to sign up.
So far, I don’t see the point of foresquare. Well, that’s not entirely true. I read an article last week on foursquare and Dennis Crowley (http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/06/04/foursquare.dennis.crowley/) that shed a bit of light into why it’s a great social media tool (basically, you can see where your friends are at a given moment), but unless it catches on, that point is moot. I can tell you from experience that remembering to check-in at places is slightly annoying. And I’m rarely sitting at home thinking, “I wonder what my friends are doing? Let me check foursquare!” Granted, part of this is because most of my friends are not actually on foursquare, but in a world of texting and Facebook status updates, is foursquare really necessary?
Furthermore, my argument with Twitter was always that people would tire of managing too many social media apps and that it didn’t have a clear business plan beyond simple status updates. Given that Facebook integrated status updates into its services, people would eventually tire of Twitter and managing multiple accounts and the fad would die out. My prediction is turning out to be right.
Yelp now integrates check-ins and coupons as part of its service package and, given its range of services, I don’t see how foursquare can compete with its limited scope. In this scenario, foursquare is to Twitter what Yelp is to Facebook. I just don’t see how foursquare can survive.
I stumbled on this article that pretty much sums up my feelings on much of the social media revolution: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/dont-bother-following-me-on-twitter/?src=busln. With too much out there, messages are thrown into space and are lost. Eventually, everything will streamline into one or two core applications that will be the go-tos. We’re already seeing that with Goliath Facebook eating other smaller social media companies alive. It will be interesting to see where we are three years from now.