It’s live! To the million businesses on foursquare: you can now use local updates to talk to your loyal customers

Jul 19th

foursquare’s mission is to help people make the most of where they are, and a big part of that is helping to connect people with places they love. With the launch of local updates yesterday, we’ve made it easier than ever for the nearly 1,000,000 businesses on foursquare to connect with their loyal customers (for free).

Starting today, if you’ve claimed your location on foursquare, you’ll see our redesigned merchant dashboard when you log in. As before, you can update your listing information, create specials, and see analytics about your foot traffic. But you’ll notice we’ve also added a ton of new features to make managing your locations easy and intuitive.

Share updates with your loyal customers
Is an author coming to your bookstore to give a reading? Did a shipment of this season’s hottest heels just arrive? Have a delicious new dish on your menu? Let your loyal customers know.

Updates can be anything – from news about an upcoming event to photos of the daily specials, and they show up right in your customers’ friends tab when they’re in the same city.

  • Talk to your loyal customers. We automatically connect you with people who have liked your business, or who check in there often.
  • Your updates are shared everywhere. Updates go to your fans, on your business page (check out Luke’s Lobster’s), appear after a person checks in, and show up in foursquare Explore. It’s like being able to put the chalkboard where you write your daily specials in tons more places.
  • Updates are easy to create. You can quickly attach photos, specials, and share to Twitter and Facebook – it’s as easy as writing a tweet.

Tools for small businesses, large chains, and everything in between
This upgrade isn’t just about local updates. We also revamped our merchant tools (and made them all look much, much prettier).

  • Share at all your locations, a few, or just one. Whether you’re Starbucks or you run a couple of local boutiques, managing multiple locations just got a million times simpler (we measured it). Create one special for all your locations, or craft a unique identity for each (or anything in between).
  • Measure your success. Your dashboard now has more tabs, fancier graphics and better insights into your location’s visitors and performance – view aggregated stats across all your locations, a handful of places, or just one.
  • Run specials with ease. Create and run specials at a group of places or a single location without any extra steps. Use the new toggle button to easily end or reactivate past campaigns.

Ready to get going? Learn more about updates and start sharing them today. Not on foursquare yet? Claim your location in less than 90 seconds and get access to all our free tools to grow your business.

Posted in Business Foursquare