Have you already taken the first step to successfully using foursquare for business? Of course, that first step being claiming your venue on foursquare. If so, great job! As foursquare grows, more and more business owners are going to begin adding it to their Marketing Tool Belt. You are ahead of your peers when it comes to using foursquare to grow your business. One of the greatest benefits to claiming your venue on foursquare is your immediate access to foursquare Stats. Foursquare recently released their Analytics feature, with the goal of providing more value to businesses.
What we are going to discuss today is one component of foursquare Stats, Check-In Time. To access your foursquare Stats, be sure you’re logged in, you’ve claimed your venue on foursquare, and you’re on your foursquare venue page. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see the Stats section. Within the Stats section, further down the page, is a section entitled, “Time Breakdown”. The Time Breakdown section of foursquare Stats shows business owners when their customers are checking-in at their venue. Why is understanding when people check-in at your venue on foursquare important? Well, that’s what we are about to discuss.
The Time Breakdown section of foursquare Stats shows business owners when customers are most active at their venue. The report is broken down into 4 sections:
- Morning (6am – 12pm)
- Afternoon (12pm – 5pm)
- Evening (5pm – 12am)
- Late night (12am – 6am)
Next to each time slot is the percentage of check-ins that occurred during those hours. Understanding when people are checking-in at your venue, helps you to understand your heaviest store traffic times, and your lightest store traffic times. Knowing this information can help you manage, and market, your small business much more effectively. Here are a few benefits to knowing the Time Breakdown of check-ins at your small business:
- Preparing your employee schedule – Knowing when traffic is heaviest, and lightest, at your store, will allow you to schedule more employees to be in the store during peak hours, and less employees during slow hours
- Cleaning & restocking – Have you ever been to a store when they are cleaning the floors or restocking the shelves? It’s a little bit frustrating and can lead to people leaving your store. By scheduling your cleaning and restocking during your slow times, you can avoid having frustrated customers.
- Special sales events – If you want to get more people into your store during your slow periods, then create special savings events that are only valid during certain times of the day. If you can maintain your high traffic times, while increasing traffic during your slow times, you will see sales growth.
These are only a few of the benefits to knowing when your customers are checking-in at your venue on foursquare. Keeping a close eye on the Time Breakdown section of foursquare Stats is extremely easy, and very useful. Can anyone else think of any benefits from knowing when customers are checking-in at your venue on foursquare?
Download our new FREE eBook: How to Use Foursquare to Grow Your Business
The Swarm Badge on Foursquare is unlocked when a Foursquare flash mob is created at any location. A Foursquare flash mob consists of at least 50 people being in the same place at the same time. Now, of course, you can influence this so that a Foursquare flash mob occurs at your small business, just like this 
You might be thinking, well, it sounds like it could really work…but what happens if it really works?? I could be on the hook for a big donation. That’s very true, and it’s exactly why you may want to tie the Check-in process with a foursquare special and percentage donation. This way you only make a donation on the transactions that occur as a direct result of the promotion. If a customer uses the foursquare special to receive a discount on her purchase, then you use a percentage of that sale to make a donation. As long as you tie the donation to the purchase, you should have enough money at the end of the promotion for the donation. You can also make it a flat donation; it doesn’t have to be a percentage (ie. For every purchase using the foursquare special, we’ll donate $2 to charity). 
As a business owner, you are probably starting to see the power of FourSquare for business. The more people you get to “check-in” at your local business, the better. Basically those customers who check-in at your local business on FourSquare, just helped you market your business. The cost to you, $0.
