This is part 1 of a two part post about businesses in Australia using Foursquare. Part 2, ‘10 examples of businesses in Australia already using Foursquare for marketing’, can be found here.
Foursquare only arrived in Australia last November, just 8 months ago. Needless to say, it’s still fairly early days for the location-based service on these (digital) shores.
I’m not exactly sure how many Foursquare users there are in Australia right now, but according to one source, there are at least 60,000 in Sydney. It would be great to get a current, official number from the company (none has been forthcoming from the company by the time of this post). It has however been confirmed by Foursquare that they have passed 100 million checkins and have over 2 million users worldwide. This is not huge compared to the likes of Facebook, with now over 500 million users, or Twitter with well over 100 million, but as I said, it’s still early days.
I remember back when Twitter had about 2 million users and was a relatively small community locally. It’s taken about 4 years to go from zero to over 100 million users. It’s changed quite a bit, especially from a marketing standpoint! With Foursquare, the second million users have been collected in just three months, and they have recently raised $20 million in funding for further development. However, Facebook has flagged that it will be launching a location feature soon, so it’ll be interesting to see how that impacts Foursquare’s fast growing user base.
Forrester has just come out with some research that suggests that Foursquare is still too small for major agencies and their clients to be bothered with, as even in the U.S. only 4% of adults online have ever used location-based mobile apps. Whereas, more than 11% of adults online have used Twitter and an estimated 28% of all internet users have signed up for Facebook.
Well it might be correct to say that in many cases, but I’m here to say that this certainly doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be used right now in certain circumstances, especially as Foursquare has the potential to be beneficial for many small and medium enterprises, as well at larger companies. I think it all depends on how and why you intend to use it, and how you approach using it.
For instance, if you are wanting to attract tech savvy early adopters (who are all using up-to-date mobile devices and using mobile data regularly) to your business or service , and there are plenty of businesses who would like to do that, why wouldn’t you think about giving it a go? Quite a few of these people are also likely to be heavy users of services such as Twitter and Facebook, which Foursquare checkins are often crossposted to. This group is also also more likely to write blogs.
Foursquare is also at the stage where, if you are a business using it to attract new customers and to reward loyal customers, you might actually get some welcome free media attention (traditional or otherwise) for taking the initiative. This certainly happened when Twitter started to catch on. Journalists take notice of local examples of wider tech and social media trends being used.
When Twitter eventually broke into mass pop culture, when celebrities started using it and talking about it, and it started being the talk of tv the talkshow circuit, some businesses and individuals who had been using it for quite a while benefited from already having experience with this new communications tool. They were one step ahead of the pack.
Could it be similar with Foursquare? Not sure but it’s certainly possible. Time will tell.
So, having said that, in my next post I’m going to take a look at what some businesses have been doing with Foursquare so far in Australia. Who are some of these initial experimenters and what have they been doing with it?
What are your thoughts on businesses using Foursquare at this stage?
Part 2, ‘10 examples of businesses in Australia already using Foursquare for marketing’.
