Irish businesses urged to embrace Foursquare.com
Irish retail and hospitality firms are being urged to adopt the latest social networking trend, Foursquare.com.
Foursquare is a location-based social networking service that allows people to follow where their friends are in Irish, US and European cities.
The system works using a downloadable application on an iPhone or Android smartphone. The application connects to Twitter and Facebook.
More than 200 Irish people have signed into the system in less than one month of Dublin being opened on it, and without any promotional fanfare.
In other countries, small companies are adopting the system to promote their businesses. In New York, several venues offer promotions for people who are ‘mayors’ of certain locations, such as drink promotions for those who go there and ‘check in’ on Foursquare.
For the companies participating, it’s free word-of-mouth advertising for the venues. Users can choose to tweet their locations when they move between Foursquare venues.
The service was created by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, after Google bought Crowley’s Dodgeball service but never used it.
