What’s Foursquare and Why You Can’t Ignore it.

What is Foursquare and what’s all the fuss about it? Foursquare or 4sq for short, is a small targeted social network, and its specific purpose is for you to check into a physical location or event when you are nearby, in return, some businesses, events or locations may offer you a perk. For example if you go to your grocery store maybe when you check-in, the store will give you a 5% off your total bill.

Foursquare is the new loyalty program much like the program that your grocery store has had for years.

The difference between Foursquare and the old way of doing this, is that Foursquare interactive and you can have your friends play with you in it. Also, it isn’t limited to grocery stores. Any type of business can use it to reward its customers or to entice new clients to check out their offerings. You can find friends via your Facebook account or you can look for them by first name and last name or you can connect to them via Twitter; you can also make new friends. I really want you to take a look at foursquare and consider joining it for several reasons.

I can give you tons of ideas about how you can use for your business or as an individual all day long but really I’m just going to tell you a couple examples of how I noticed 4sq during the past year and maybe that will convince you that is a cool network to join.

Late spring / early summer last year my wife and I went to Napa Valley. We are big fans of wine, in fact we got married at a winery and so wine tasting is always something that we like to do. To my surprise when we checked into a few places in the area we got bottles of wine, I thought that was pretty cool. In fact Dry Creek Vineyards reached out to us and actually offered us a VIP tour and we got there it was really amazing, Thanks Bill. That’s one example.

More recently for New Year’s Eve, we went to Las Vegas. Turns out that Las Vegas is using Foursquare very efficiently. Lots of venues are taking advantage of it and a lot of people are using it to check in and keep track of their friends and talk to each other. My friend Stacey tells me that she’s noticed that Foursquare is growing in popularity in big metropolitan areas so it’s not necessarily just a Vegas phenomenon. Other cities that have a large Foursuqare user base include San Francisco, New York, Long Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo.

In Las Vegas, the way that some casinos and hotels use it is that they give you a discount when you check-in. You might get a discount to their restaurant or maybe you get a discount to your room. Usually, you have to go to the customer service desk, mention your check-in and get your discount. Of course, they’ll ask you a few questions first and this is where the value of Foursquare comes in.

Fortunately, this is not limited to the big casinos and hotels; I even saw places like CVS or Walgreens offering specials where you might get a small percentage of your bill at checkout.

So if you’ve never heard of Foursquare take a look and join. If you have any questions let me know, make me your friend and I can help you through the process of learning and using it. In another post, soon I’m going to explain how to use it for your business and how to have fun and succeed as an individual.