Foursquare Rolls Out Local Updates for Merchants. Just last month, Foursquare users were blessed with a redesign. On Wednesday, Foursquare announced a new feature for merchants as well: Foursquare Local Updates. The feature — which rolls out to businesses over the next week — lets participating business owners send updates about their business to their "best customers" when they’re nearby. Updates can be any combination of text, up to three photos and a special, and will be seen in version 5.2 of the app, which is available now. Although Groupon and LivingSocial both offer ways to blast deals to mobile users nearby, Foursquare's latest update lets merchants add non-deal updates, like "Warm cookies fresh out of the oven available now!
" that don't have an offer attached, much like a tweet or Facebook status. Two points of clarification on updates: "Customers nearby" is anyone within a small radius, which is determined by Foursquare's reading of GPS data. Until now, Foursquare was a pretty low-maintenance platform for merchants. Everything You Need to Know About Foursquare's New Merchant Tools.
The location-sharing app is connecting merchants with loyal customers in entirely new ways. July 23, 2012 On Wednesday, Foursquare announced a slew of new merchant tools that give business owners more power than ever before to communicate with their customers through the location-based platform. Before, business owners could claim their venues, set up a special and let the platform take it from there—it was more of a passive marketing tool.
The new additions make Foursquare's local updates far more dynamic, and they leverage location-based marketing in a more targeted way than Facebook and Twitter. The revamp has several parts: Below, we give you skinny on what you need to know and how to take advantage of the platform. Creating an Update Local updates let business owners who've claimed their venues send updates about their business to their "best customers" when they’re nearby. Here's how you send an update. First, in the dropdown menu, decide which venues you'd like the update to target. How Social Signals Could Potentially Influence Local Search Results. For a local business, localized search results are lifeblood to them. Focusing on a local SEO strategy can often have a bigger impact on their business model than focusing on the full organic results.
A lot of smaller local businesses aren’t blessed with an extremely large marketing budget and could have potentially resorted to tactics that caught them up in the Penguin filter. There are ways to take advantage of the local space without spending an extraordinary amount of money, while leveraging your social community at the same time. When Google+ integrated local places in May and started taking advantage of the Zagat scoring system for restaurants, I naturally had questions as to how much of an impact social check-ins and geo-social signals could affect local results if we went a step further from reviews in the restaurant category and otherwise.
In search, there’s a tendency to “hop on things when they’re working” and then stick with them even if they’re not working anymore. I know. What Is the Point of... Foursquare? Whenever a trendy app comes along, there are people who ask, “What is the point of this?” If millions of people are using something, there has to be a reason. In our What Is the Point of... series, we’ll explain it to you. This week, we're asking, What is the point of Foursquare? Yes, we know. The check-in is dead. If the polls are accurate, most people don't even know location apps exist. So we don't have to care about Foursquare, right? Why, though? But turn all that off. Use Foursquare Quietly Seriously, you can ignore all the gamification in Foursquare. You can (and should) also turn off the auto-broadcasting to Twitter and Facebook. More importantly, only be Foursquare friends with people whose tastes you trust. Use It to Explore There are lots of apps out there to recommend local stores and restaurants, because that's where all the mobile money is.
You can even use Foursquare Explore on the Web, and it looks awesome on an iPad. Foursquare Group News. Location-Based Event Marketing: Foursquare + Dreamforce Case Study. Location-based marketing can be a valuable customer acquisition strategy and a way to break though the noise when competing for the attention of potential prospects. Foursquare offers a free set of tools to help you attract new customers and keep your best ones coming back. Using Foursquare as a marketing communication channel is beneficial because although a relatively small user base (as of March 2011, 8 Million users ), they are loyal and consistent users. It also takes almost no time to develop a campaign and special offer, so the return on investment can be high. Foursquare marketing is most appropriate for brick and mortar businesses, but anyone can take advantage of Foursquare.
Dreamforce had 45,000 registered attendees and 30,000 who actually attended the conference. The challenges of exhibiting at The Cloud Computing Event of the Year is to stand out from other exhibitors, capture the attention of attendees and drive them to the booth as they browse through the exhibition hall.