1 square, 2 square, 3 square, FOUR!

Need a new way to attract customers to your business? foursquare may be a catalyst for your brand recognition.  foursquare is a popular mobile app that is all about where consumers go. Invented by two college students, Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, in an effort to make something interactive for busy consumers on the go, this app has over 25 million users in the United State alone! With over 2.5 billion check-in's so far and over 1 billion businesses using  foursquare to promote their services, this app is on its way to being relevant for most businesses with a brick and mortar location.

 foursquare is easy to use and user updates are added immediately. All updates stay live on each user's profile for up to 2 weeks after the time of the check-in.  foursquare is highly visual and allows other consumers to see who is going to what businesses and how often they are going. It is common knowledge that customers want to go where other people are going and want to interact with a brand that other people are interacting with. This social element of  foursquare is what is keeping consumers engaged and interested in this app. Because it is all about customers and their opinions, it is easy to see that this app provides relatively transparent information from frequent visitors to various businesses.

 foursquare can be easily used by businesses both large and small, national and local. To claim your business online, just search for your listing and apply to be recognized as the manager of that location. From there,  foursquare will call you to verify that you are the business manager or supervisor of that location. Once your business profile is live, you will have the option to specialize deals for your location and have access to customer information through your personalized "Merchant Dashboard". This dashboard measures consumers total check-ins, average check-ins per day, gender, age, and location of customer base and the most popular times of day to run promotions. The benchmarking tools available on  foursquare are very useful and provide insights as to who is coming to your location and why they are visiting or continue to come back.

Once you have created your business profile, you can start creating specials for your customers that use  foursquare. You can add discounts, freebies, and loyalty specials to give customers an incentive to try your services for the first time or to reward those that regularly visit your business. The customer that is the most frequent patron of your business is known as the "Mayor" of your business on  foursquare and can have a large influence over how consumers view your brand.

As a business on  foursquare, you can have a page, like button, share with  foursquare button, and Partner badges. These marketing tools can be used in a myriad of ways to attract more consumers to your business. So, want to know who is coming to your business and what they think of your services? Download  foursquare on your mobile phone today to start engaging with your mobile consumers!