Four Reasons Why I Love Foursquare
I’m sure most of you have heard of foursquare already. If you haven’t no big deal, you will very shortly. For those of you that have, don’t feel bad if you were confused at what it was used for. I remember seeing people tweet about being a mayor of some bar or some hot spot, but I had no idea what it meant. At first, I thought they were just trying to be funny and say that they owned the place, or a king of the hill type of deal. I became curious and started clicking on the links in their tweets and kept going to this foursquare place. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I signed up and started to learn what it was all about.
Here are four reasons why foursquare will become a love of your life.
Networking
The first placed that I checked in at was a Barnes and Noble at Boca Raton. I noticed that I wasn’t the first person to have logged into this place. This leads to the first reason and quite possibly the most important, networking. If you are at an event and you check in, there may have been others who checked in as well that you didn’t know were there. Even if you don’t know the people, you can meet new people that are there who are using the application also. Foursquare gives you an easy opportunity to find and connect with more people. You know, the social part of social media. Continuing with my example, I saw that the people who already checked in recommended a few books. One of them was a business book, so I decided to check it out and see what the book was about. I wouldn’t have never heard of the book if it wasn’t for that.
Local Business Awareness
If you frequent a local coffee shop, or diner, or bookstore, then you are giving this local small business some free advertising. For those of us who run small businesses, there’s not much more you can ask for then free press or awareness. Let’s say for instance that someone who blogs about great coffee is always checking in at the same local coffee shop, wouldn’t you be more interested in checking that place out for some coffee if you are ever in town. There, of course, can be an abuse to this free marketing, which I will discuss later.
Location Awareness
This is useful when you are out on town and your friends are trying to meet up with you or find out exactly where you are or where the party or occasion is at. Quick example. Just last weekend I was headed to this place called “The Lodge” in Boca Raton, FL. I didn’t know exactly where it was, but one of my buddies was already there and had checked in at The Lodge, in fact he is the mayor there. While on my iPhone I was able to bring up the address and exact location and use Google maps to locate it and then realized I knew exactly where it was.
Foursquare Tips
Foursquare has a comment and tip section built directly into it. I primarily use foursquare only on my iPhone. If I am driving, I can use the app to determine places nearby where people have checked in before and I can read their comments about the food, or coffee, or the customer service, etc. Foursquare has made my life easier over the past couple of months by using it.
As I mentioned above in the local small business awareness section, there can be some abuse to this. There seems to be a fine line to walk when it comes to this subject. Some companies have began to send out ads via foursquare. They check in themselves and send out ads. Is this right or wrong, well that’s up to you to decide. I read an article previously, not sure where it was, I will look back and edit the post with the due credit, about a small business owner who checked in on foursquare every single day at his office. This raised awareness about the company. There were no ads being sent out, so nothing was spammy about the situation. It will be a challenge for foursquare to keep out the spammers, but there will be some just like with anything out there.
I love foursquare. If you haven’t started using it yet, I recommend starting today. If you are not an iPhone user, no problem, you can download the app for the Android, Palm, and other devices.
photo credit: Roslan Tangah (aka Rasso) via photopin cc