I read this very interesting article about Foursquare. I have faith that Foursquare will become one of the mainstream topic of next year. It is still a young start up, but they found out a great niche, and deliver great service.
Foursquare allows people to check in places while they visit it, which gives them points in order to get some “badges”. Then eventually, it now proposes special deals for “mayors” (people which checks in the most in a specific place) and other users.
The service is doing pretty good and I have seen a lot of French retailers starting proposing vouchers to Foursquare’s users:
o Flunch, a fast food chain proposes free coffee to checkers.
o Virgin radio has had a commercial telling they were the first French radio to be on Foursquare.
Now Foursquare announces that they will be focusing in the future on what users will do after a check in (meaning their next steps). This will imply the creation of a new “recommendation” feature.
Hence they have launched Foursquare Explore tab, which allows user to determine what kind of recommendations they want, either bars, restaurants, movie theatres and so on.
I believe this feature will become key. As a marketing manager, I can clearly see the potential for brands and companies to leverage this system to generate foot visits in their retail/restaurants.
It will be interesting to see how sharp the recommendations will become, and how users will respond to them.
One of my main idea is that it will also help Foursquare to become more social, allowing the different users to connect more between each others, which will eventually lead to higher numbers of users.
What do you think about it?
