FourSquare Comes to Fruition

There’s a new local search player in town, straight out of the U.S.A, and its popularity is growing quickly in the Australian market. It’s known as FourSquare – and its reviewing a local business near you!

FourSquare is a hybrid social network, a magnificent mix of various online channels from viral marketing, to local search and social media. The purpose of FourSquare is to take out the banal elements of user-based reviews and take the idea to the next level by turning word-of-mouth into a fun game of sorts where users can “earn points and unlock badges for discovering new things”… And like Twitter before it, it is all streamed in real-time.

If you’re unfamiliar with how it works, FourSquare functions like most local search oriented websites by tapping into the Google Maps API to register the location of your computer’s I.P address. This allows the service to give you the most accurate search results based on your geographic location, and a meaure of proximity. Everytime I land on the FourSquare home page for example, Google registers me as closest to ‘Sydney’. It’s intelligent stuff, and it’s even cooler when you use it from your iPhone (and it’s free to download, too).

With iPhone sales in Australia experiencing an accelerated growth, local search is becoming not only relevant on the web but also relevant to smart phones. FourSquare has cemented its place here already, with the concept originating as an iPhone application. Local businesses, namely retail businesses, have already started taking advantage of Four Square to make themselves known. Business owners can search for themselves on FourSquare and claim their listing as the ‘business manager’. Some have already started incentivizing use of FourSquare amongst customers regularly using the iPhone app. There are cafés and restaurants for example who offer unlimited free coffees to the “mayor” of their FourSquare listing – certainly a great idea for smaller businesses who wish to increase their presence on the web.

While FourSquare is inadvertently American, it’s beginning to mean serious business in the Australian market. We recommend checking it out if you haven’t already, as it’s a great way to incentivize your customers and synchronize your online and in-store efforts. If you want to see FourSquare at its best, check out the below example of Campos Coffee in Newtown:

http://foursquare.com/venue/343765

Is it time you started integrating FourSquare into your local search strategy?