How can Foursquare help your business

You may remember us talking about Foursquare before; we’ve even done an introductory post on Foursquare for businesses here on the blog.

As it is operation sharing useful content on the blog this month, a couple of days ago we found this great article from Mashable on how to set up a Foursquare Special, which we just had to share with you.

How to: Set up a FourSquare Special by Lauren Drell, Mashable

We have also provided our own take on FourSquare specials for your review. Enjoy ;)

So what are the advantages of registering your business with them?

For starters, it’s a popular service, growing in numbers; in 2010 alone on their official blog, Foursquare reveals they experienced a 3400% increase in growth, and a staggering 381 million check ins.

Not only does signing your venue up on Foursquare open up a huge potential audience, but you can actively encourage visitors through Foursquare via the use of their ‘Foursquare Specials', from a Friends Special encouraging groups to a Newbie Special to encourage newcomers through your doors, there’s a wide range of potential deals to set up with the aim of encouraging people to check into your venue.

When it comes to promoting these specials, Foursquare can lend you a helping hand providing you with official window stickers, encouraging visitors to check in.


In addition to Specials, ownership of the venue on Foursquare will allow you to view a full set of real-time data about your customers. Imagine it like a real-life analytics! On your dashboard you’ll be able to see statistics such as total daily check-ins over time to viewing your most recent and frequent visitors and even whether they are broadcasting their check-ins to Twitter and Facebook.

Of course, whilst Foursquare might be one of the larger and (currently) in our opinion the best established of these services, it is by no means the only option! We’ve covered other location based marketing services as MePlease and Facebook Deals among others, in previous blog posts, both of which are more than worth a peruse. Enjoy ;)


Author: Alice Cheetham

Introducing Foursquare for Business

Early this month Foursquare announced the revamped Foursquare for Business pages, complete with tools for merchants, venues and brands. We have been very excited about this development and thought it was about time to share the news with you guys.

We wrote about Foursquare back in June 2010: with the post 5 reasons hotels should be using the Geo location based portal. As a recap FourSquare allows you to virtual check-in to your location via your mobile phone (GPS), you can share reviews and tips with your FourSquare community, you can earn points, collect badges and discover new things and with your social network community at large. View the video here:

Now you have had time to digest the concept of Foursquare, back to the New Business Pages.

The objective of the pages is to help businesses owners attract new customers and maintain brand loyalty. There are two types of brand pages those for brands which have a physical location and those that are not tied to a physical location such as university, manufacturer.
For those brands not tied to a physical location, here are the instructions for setting up a brand page on Foursquare: http://foursquare.com/business/brands

Currently Foursquare are making the brand pages manually at the request of partners, so if interested they invite you to download a form. News in the self service tool will be available to all very soon.

After your brand page is set up you can start leaving tips for your followers, a few examples from Foursquare are listed below:

The New York Times guided their foursquare followers to the best spots to visit while in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Windows Live Photo Gallery helped their followers locate the best spots in their cities to take photos.

Havaianas directed their followers to the best local spots to watch World Cup games, where they shared soccer trivia and gave away free flip-flops.

TravelOK.com helps their users unlock Oklahoma’s best-kept secrets, find discounts and discover hidden attractions throughout the state.

We (Flashlight Team) are increasingly being invited to create geo targeted campaigns for our clients. If you are interested in Geo location services or after viewing the above links perhaps you simply want to find out more about Foursquare and how it applies to your business then please get in touch with Rocktime Sales.


Author: Sarah Griffiths

5 reasons Hotels should use Foursquare

With the surge in popularity of the smart phones, social media sites like FourSquare, which offer ‘Geo location based Checkins’, are ones to watch. Foursquare allow users to ‘check in’ using mobile phones when they visit any location be it a cafe, library, office, shop, hotel etc. They can share their location with friends and win virtual badges for their activity ie: ‘ a mayor badge – for person who visits the location the most’. Find out more about Foursquare here.

The above image shows a hotel, local to our offices and a recommendation I gave; anyone who searched for ‘Hotel Du Vin’, on FourSquare, or who searches for 'Nearby Tips' when in Poole will see this review.

The Guardian wrote an article as a FourSquare user, have a read, as it explains the concept of Foursquare well: "Yesterday I took the tube into central London and walked to a random corner of Soho. I opened the app on my phone and went to the "nearby tips" section....."

Sharing with you, our top 5 reasons why hotel marketers should use FourSquare

1. Provides ability to send out offers and promotions, to local visitors, using FourSquare and interact with your customers Such as:
@ Hotel Max: Come in, show our front desk that you checked in on Foursquare and get a $20 gift card to use towards your next stay and be entered into a raffle to win a free stay!

2. FourSquare can help hotels drive repeat business, as people come back to the same place to become ‘mayor’ (receiving a badge for number of check ins) and retain their position.

3. On search of local places it allows people to find out more about you from others, i.e. This hotel has the best Wi-Fi access in Poole, and allows the hotel owners to learn from peoples comments.

4. Enhances brand regonition via increased awareness within Twitter, as many Twitter users opt to link their Foursquare account with their Twitter account, if you see that one of the people you follow regularly ‘check in’ to a certain Hotel restaurant etc, then you may be interested to find out more.

5. We’ve recently seen the site HotelChatter adding Twitter mentions and Foursquare mentions of hotels to their site under a section called Hotel Social view their story here: They are also beginning to start a list of USA Hotels using FourSquare, we will be watching this list to view how they are using this geo locater social tool.

Want to know more about FourSquare and Social Media Networks, get in touch with the Flashlight team and talk to us further about social media strategies that would suit your business.

Author: Sarah Griffiths