Stephanie Liu

Tips for Marketing on Foursquare – OMS 2011

Thanks to my current employer, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in San Diego which was held at the Downtown Westin Gaslamp Quarter. I was at the conference most of the time providing attendees with a demo of my company’s software solutions for SEM and SEO and while I wasn’t able to attend a lot of the sessions, I was able to attend a session on how marketers could leverage the location-based social media platform, Foursquare, to target and reward loyal consumers.

Mike Lewis, the speaker and  Vice President of Marketing at Awareness, Inc. kicked off his presentation with a comedy web series on YouTube produced by HubSpot, Inc. called, “Foursquare Cops,” which I had to share (see below). The rest of the presentation is up on SlideShare. If you attended the event, what was your key take away?

Foursquare Cops – HubSpot, Inc.

Top 10 Ways Marketers can Use Foursquare

Presented by Mike Lewis (@bostonmike) at OMS 2011

View more  presentations from Mike Lewis on SlideShare and visit his blog Social Episodesfor more of his insight on social media and its on today’s businesses.

If you’re already on Foursquare, feel free to add me – HeyStephanie. Check you later!

Stephanie Liu

Facebook Places…hmm, I still like Foursquare

There’s a new feature on Facebook called “Places,” that allows you to share your location with your friends by checking-in at a location. You can even tag friends that are with you which frankly, is what I like most about this feature. Like other location-based platforms, you can see if your friends have checked in nearby – that’s happened to me on several occasions when checking in on Foursquare.

However, unlike Foursquare, Facebook Places doesn’t let you become the Mayor of a location which is really what I think makes Foursquare fun from a user’s perspective. You can win badges, oust the current Mayor, and if you’re lucky…take advantage of customer exclusive rewards like becoming the Mayor of your local Starbucks and getting a discount on your next cup of coffee.

I wonder what the future plans are for Facebook Places…Will it integrate with Facebook’s business pages? What’s their strategy against competitors like Foursquare and Yelp? I guess time will only tell.

For now, I’ll stick to my current guidelines:

  1. Default check-in: Foursquare
  2. If it’s a restaurant: Yelp
  3. If a friend is with me: Facebook Places

However, despite which platform I decide to use to check-in, the funny thing is, it’ll end up on Facebook anyway. 🙂

If you’re on Foursquare, be sure to add Heystephanie. Check you later!