What 10m Foursquare Accounts Means for Marketers
Yesterday Foursquare announced that they had passed the 10m accounts milestone. That is a huge number for any business and to achieve it in a little over 2 years is a phenomenal achievement. But what, if anything, is the significance for marketers?
Along with the announcement Foursquare released an infographic that highlighted some of the statistics behind the 10m number. For example – 169 countries visited by US based Foursquare users. Target, Walmart and Macy's were the most popular retail destinations checked in at. Over 1000 people used the service to announce the birth of a child.
Mash that data together and you get a rather unsurprising picture of a mobile affluent traveling user who has recently started a family. In other words – a smart phone user. Why is that significant? Because it means that quite possibly we are seeing services like Foursquare finally leave the technology early adopter pool and move toward the affluent adopter. That doesn't mean it's gone mainstream yet – smart phones are not yet the dominant technology (though that is rapidly changing), but it does mean that we are likely to see the increase in social location sharing.
This is especially true as the check-in starts to take a back seat to the experience. Gowalla has already indicated that it is making moves to shift the focus of that tool toward a method that is less about the check-in and more about experience sharing. Foursquare released a new update today for the iPhone that increases the speed at which users can check-in and we have seen that they are already experimenting with near-field communication (NFC) that would make the check-in process even easier.
What all this means for marketers is that, if you haven't taken social location marketing seriously before, you better start including it in your marketing mix. With companies like RadioShack seeing 3x the spend by consumers who check-in over those that don't, this is something that businesses can't afford to ignore. Rewarding loyal customers isn't just a nice-to-have anymore, it's an expectation of your social consumers. Social location marketing enables an organization to build a strategy around that concept and deploy it on existing technology.
How are you including location in your marketing?
