Will Irish SMEs add ‘Foursquare’ to their marketing toolkit?

Foursquare, a location based social network that incorporates gaming elements, is planning to distribute a free analytics tool, which will give business owners access to a range of information about visitors to their premises.

With the new analytics dashboard, businesses will be able to see a range of real-time data about Foursquare usage, including who has “checked in” to their place via Foursquare, when they arrived, the male-to-female customer ratio and which times of day are more active for certain customers.

According to the New York Times, a test customer, P.C.C. Natural Markets, a Seattle-based organic foods company, saw a large number of new Foursquare users coming to its stores over the weekend and used the analytics tool to figure out where they were coming from.

“By using the Foursquare dashboard, we figured out that they were coming for a new organic doughnut that had been advertised on TV,” said Ricardo Rabago, social media specialist for the company.

Various venues worldwide already use Foursquare to retain customers and attract new clients, and offer special deals to users who are “mayors”. For example, Starbucks extends local store mayor specials to all its stores with a single $1 frappuchino coupon for any Starbucks mayor at any Starbucks.

In Ireland, a Dublin food store, The Market, has embraced foursquare and offers incentives such “Check in at our store using our Free wifi and get a free coffee for every 3 logins to our store!” The store uses Twitter to share the promotions with their followers.

As Irish SMEs warm to using social networks such as Facebook and Twitter for business, do you think “Foursquare” is a tool that they should add to their marketing toolkit?

For more information about how Foursquare works, you can visit here.