Over 500,000 businesses are on foursquare! That’s a lot of Specials!

Two weeks ago, we passed a pretty big milestone on foursquare, with over 10,000,000 people in the foursquare community. Last week, we hit another one that excites us just as much: we now have over half a million merchants on foursquare.

When a business joins foursquare, they get a few main benefits:

• Businesses can offer Specials to their customers, helping them find new ones and rewards their most loyal ones.
• They can see useful information about their visitors, like what times and days are most popular, and which are your most loyal customers.
• They get to customize their venue page, making sure the address and map are accurate and adding a twitter handle and description.

And, best of all, it’s 100% free!

To give you an idea of what you can do, here are some of the Specials running this week from some of our over 500,000 merchants:

• To reward their digital customers, a bunch of Radisson hotels in England are giving people on foursquare two extra hours of rest before check out.

• To get more people into their bar at the beginning of the night, PASC bar in Rhode Island is running a Flash Special, where the first ten people each night get a $5 pitcher.

• Aiming to attract people who are tired of the summer heat, some McDonald’s restaurants are giving free summer drinks with a sandwich purchase.

• And, if you’re in Dubai and shopping for a MacBook Air (and, really, why not), check in at iSTYLE and get a free SuperDrive.

If you’re a merchant, simply head over to foursquare.com/business to get started. With millions of people out in the world checking in, it’s a great way to stay connected.

– Eric Friedman – Director of Business Development