Introducing Promoted Updates – helping you discover new businesses and money-saving specials around you

Last week we launched Local Updates to help you keep up with the places you love in your friends tab. Today, we’re introducing a new way for you to discover places when you’re looking for what to do next: Promoted Updates (including Promoted Specials!) in your Explore tab. It’s a great way to find out what’s happening at a local coffee shop, save money on your next clothing purchase, or just discover a store you’ve never been to before.

Promoted updates are just like the local updates that you see in your friends tab, except that businesses can pay to promote them in our Explore results. The update can be a money-saving special, an update on a new fashion line, or a photo of their latest dish. It works similar to ads on Google; there, if you search for ‘laptops,’ you’ll see an ad for an electronics website next to the results. In foursquare, if you do the same search in Explore you might see a promoted special about a weekend deal at a nearby computer store. Check out some examples:

The algorithms that power Explore’s personalized recommendations are the same ones we use to figure out which updates are perfect for you. For example, promoted updates might include places that are on your lists, places your friends have been to or liked, or places you’d likely want to check out given the time of day or neighborhood you’re in. We spent a lot of time designing this so you’ll never see a promoted update from a place that the Explore algorithm wouldn’t recommend for you.

We’re rolling this out today with local businesses as well as nationwide brands. Here’s a sample of our about 20 pilot partners: B&B Hospitality group (Otto Las Vegas, B&B Ristorante, Carnevino and Pizzeria Mozza), Best Buy, BR Guest Hospitality (Dos Caminos and Atlantic Grill), Butter Lane, Crunch, Dave & Buster’s, Gap, Hilton, jcpenney, Lowe’s, Old Navy, Starwood Preferred Guest, The Standard Miami, Walgreens, and ‘wichcraft.

Over the coming months, we’re looking forward to seeing how businesses use promoted updates and how our community interacts with them. We’ll keep making improvements, and look forward to offering the same tools to the nearly 1,000,000 businesses on foursquare today.

If you’re a business and would like to learn more about promoted updates, sign up here. You can also claim your business to start using our free merchant tools today, including sharing local updates with your loyal customers.