In light of recent developments, it seems that local Marketing Using Facebook is only going to keep gaining significance, so how can other services keep themselves relevant?
You may remember earlier this week, we wrote about Facebook announcing Facebook Nearby, a service that would essentially render Foursquare obsolete. Not one to go gently into that good night, Foursquare has already returned fire. The service plans on upping their personalization game to compete with Zuckerberg and his merry gang.
The best part of Foursquare’s plan? They plan on using data scraped from Facebook to fight against Facebook. That’s right, they’ll be pulling data from the social network’s own pages to hold onto their bit of the market share. Here’s how Foursquare described their ironic power-move:
“When your Facebook friends do public things on Foursquare, like write a tip, like a place, or take public photos, we’ll now use that to help power your recommendations when you search in Explore.”
The best part of this data collection is that it’s through Facebook, not Foursquare itself. This means that you will get social cues from Facebook friends even if they have never interacted with you on Foursquare at all. The new personalization features are coming out soon, so Foursquare users should be sure to update your iPhone or Android app. Once you do, you’ll have to connect your personal Facebook page to Foursquare to gain all of the social recommendation benefits.
What does this mean for your business? Not a lot yet, but this is the beginning of a struggle that will have major implications. If Foursquare is able to hold on to (or even reclaim) some of their user base, then they may be around for a while, and thus will need to be at least acknowledged when developing a local strategy.
Our prediction? Foursquare is plugging holes in a newly sinking ship. They’ll hang around for a while longer, but in the end they’ll either go under or just become another Facebook acquisition. Facebook remains the first, best choice for local marketing, crown soundly in place.
Contact Wikimotive for a free evaluation of your social media strategy and advice on how you can improve.