After writing a few posts on how businesses might start thinking about how they could leverage Fourquare, it’s been a topic of conversation in just about every coffee meet up since. Today was a great conversation with Faye Stock Oney and Jan Antauer. Jan is in the coffee business in Historic Dublin, and makes a great cup of Joe.
Given her location among other very active small business entrepreneurs in the district, using Foursquare would make a ton of sense. Here were some of the bullet point action items we came up with:
- Get a small monitor to keep behind the counter so that employees can pull in a Twitter feed and keep Java Jan Coffee’s Fourquare profile front and center
- Hang some signage at the counter and around the store, and ask or remind customers to check in.
- Java Jan’s uses a paper customer loyalty card where patrons get a free coffee after the 5th purchase. Why not apply this same idea to Foursquare check ins?
- Java Jan’s shares a building with Our CupCakery and is within a few blocks of other local businesses. Tips could be used to suggest a sequence tour for walkers in teh district.
Web Traffic & Adoption
But why has conversation suddenly picked up around Foursquare? In Columbus, Gowalla seemed to somehow claim the local market as a strong player in location based applications. But how long will that last? Your guess is a good as mine.
Take a look at some of the traffic numbers from Compete.
You can see the explosion in Foursquare adoption over the past 6 months. I believe that the spike can at least in part be attributed to the gaming aspect and visible point system present in Foursquare. What’s interesting is that one of the original location based payers, BrightKite, is actually on the decline in terms of website traffic.
However, these numbers should be taken into current context.
- Remember that the majority of usage on location based applications lives on mobile devices.
- Recent press surrounding the dangers of location based applications have been centered on Fourquare
- The traffic report above looks at total visitors and does not necessarily break out repeat visits versus new visits.
Could Yelp Still Win
Google had a major advantage when they launched Buzz. Millions of people were already Gmail users, which automatically made them Buzz users, whether they wanted to be or not. Yelp is now finding themselves and there user base in a similar situation.
Look at Yelps traffic in comparison to Foursquare and Gowalla. You only see a orange line graphed because Yelp’s traffic is literally more than 20 times that of the other location based apps.
Yelp’s established base could potentially position them as the leader in location based applications, if they focused on the following:
- Create a cleaner user interface than the other two competitors
- Focus on building out a score-based gaming aspect to their location based application
- Use more traditional tactics like email to promote their service and raise awareness
- Develop a partner program for locations that promote the use of Yelp’s location based applications at the retail storefront and point of purchase
Time is Short
My gut tells me that we will see the major player in location based applications determined by the end of 2010. The trend has taken hold and despite some of the negative publicity in recent weeks, location based applications are being quickly and broadly adopted.
In recent months, the rate of growth for Foursquare adoption is nothing short of staggering. Given that Foursquare’s current velocity is maintained, it’s going to be challenging for any of the more start-up players to compete for market share. And even with a large base to build from, more established players like Yelp still will need to act quickly to capture users and re brand themselves into this new category.
What’s your take on the location based race? Who do you think will dominate by the end of the year?Why?
Photo Credit: @fayeincolumbus
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