FourSquare: The Rise of Location-Based Social Networking Applications

For those of you who haven't heard, FourSquare is one of many emerging location-aware social networking applications. And like most social networking applications, FourSquare is a great tool to support and encourage the creation of communities around your brand.

While the growth of FourSquare has been rapid, the application still has a relatively limited reach compared to other social apps and the final marketing model is still being worked out. In the meantime, if you want to use FourSquare to reach customers, it is best to refrain from using the platform to aggressively advertise and instead tie promotions to community activity. This model has worked well with other social media platforms and it's likely that FourSquare will continue to follow this trend.

Here are a couple of ways to tie FourSquare promotions to community activity:

1. Create promotions that reward customer loyalty. This can be done by providing discounts for frequent visits or when customers bring in friends as new customers. In FourSquare, the person who visits your location the most times becomes that location's "mayor." Loyalty could also be rewarded by providing recognition of your mayors on your primary web site.

2. Create promotions that leverage the gaming aspect of FourSquare. FourSquare lets users gain points and unlock badges through the use of the service. Bravo Television and Intel have both created custom badges within FourSquare that users can gain through interacting with the brands. Creating similar custom badges is another way that FourSquare could be leveraged to support your own unique communities.

FourSquare is like other social media platforms, but with the added dimension of location. This gives rise to several exciting opportunities to engage your customers. In addition, with the growing ubiquity of GPS-enabled smart phones, the rise of apps like FourSquare that leverage user location will also continue to grow.