Posted by Ed Loessi on April 20, 2011
Social Media Examiner had a great blog post titled “Social Media Location-Based Services: Foursquare vs. Facebook Places”
“Ask any marketer about trends for 2011 and you’ll undoubtedly hear the phrase “location-based services.” However, among Foursquare, Facebook Places, SCVNGR, Gowalla and many others, marketers have a lot to choose from.”
One of the interesting stats that came out of the article was a comparison that was run looking at the number of check-ins for the same location between Foursquare and Facebook Places.
“Foursquare overwhelmingly dominated in the experiment, with 5x (or more) the number of check-ins in some cases. It’s unclear if these numbers apply to all businesses in all cities, but Foursquare users appear to be far more active than Facebook Places users.”
Part of is not surprised by the difference because often an application that specializes in a certain activity is actually better a performing the task, in this case Foursquare is built for checking into places and picking up deals, earning badges and connecting with people you are not already connected with whereas, Facebook is really good at being a social network. That’s not to say that Facebook won’t make inroads in the location based marketing space as it clearly will, its numbers of people are just to large to do otherwise than be successful at it at some point, maybe even buying Foursquare at some time in the future?
So, what does this mean for restaurants, for retail and for hospitality marketers? Well, in the near term you will need to have your location based marketing and social media marketing programs actively working the check-in angles and you will need to be making offers and promotions across both platforms. You should also be extending that reach across other platforms like Gowalla and Google Places as they are all capable of contributing to your customer base.
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