No Foursquare for me

Companies typically use Foursquare as a way to market themselves by offering deals and informing customers of events and updates. Foursquare allows users to look for a place to shop, eat or visit based on friend recommendations. It also allows users to comment and recommend businesses and locations.  Because of this, Foursquare is a great way for businesses to use location marketing to bring new customers in and reward loyal ones.

That being said, I think Foursquare may not be the best investment for most businesses.

I won’t lie, I don’t get it. When working on this post, the first thing I searched was “who uses Foursquare.” I still don’t know the answer to that. I don’t use it. I don’t have any friends who use it. Who is using this Foursquare stuff? I know there are 30 million users (Foursquare), but I’m not sure who these users are. What age range are they? Do most of them actively use Foursquare?

People who use Foursquare only use it when they don’t know where to go. For that reason, Foursquare might not be useful when people are in their hometowns or locations they now well. They already have favorites. Maybe they use it once out of curiosity and find a new favorite, but you only need so many new places to go.

I’ve heard people say it’s great when you’re on vacation, but people don’t vacation that frequently and so they might just delete the app once they get home and never use it again.

I think people want platforms that can do many things, not just single use apps. People use Facebook because they can check-in to locations, communicate with friends and show pictures. Facebook gets the social part and the location information. Foursquare gives you a little less social and a lot of location information.  

I’m interested to see where this will go. People used to be uncomfortable with posting lots of information about themselves on Facebook. Will people become more comfortable with having their location tracked, or will Foursquare be a fad that eventually passes?  Will people be okay with single use apps or veer toward multi-use apps? I’m not sure, but I can assure you I won’t be using Foursquare anytime soon.