If you have a Facebook page, you’ve probably seen some of your friends “checking in” to various businesses around your town. Foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city guide, and game that will reward you for doing interesting things! Foursquare aims to help you and your friends keep up with what you’re doing, while at the same time, helping businesses promote specials, deals and even theme days of the week.
There are a lot of great ways to use Foursquare for your business, here are just a few tips to help get you started.
Add your listings
Adding your listings to Foursquare can really help agents as a tracking and feedback mechanism. For instance, if you “check in” every time you show a home, those clients who see your Twitter or Facebook Feed will be reminded of your listing. Set up the location and listing so that people are able to see up to date pictures and the exact location of your listing. Now, in addition to showing your listing, it will also serve as an impromptu advertisement for you, your agency and most importantly, your listing. It’s even possible to get people to make up their minds on an offer if they see you showing a property they’re interested in. A properly timed Foursquare check in can push that undecided client of yours into making a purchase!
Checking in to your listings is a great way advertise. Listing agents and homeowners alike can check and see who is showing the property and how often they are coming back.
Pursue expired listings
No one likes to see their listing expire. When a client puts up their home for sale, they’re usually expecting something quick and easy. If you’re having trouble selling a particular home, try to reignite people’s interest in the listing with Foursquare. You can check the history of the location and how many people checked in to the listing and what they might have been looking for. Adjust your strategy depending on what worked and what didn’t work in the past.
People are also known to leave comments on Foursquare check ins, so review those comments and see what people were saying about the home. Did they see repairs that needed to be done that you haven’t? Did they think the place needed more work? What was it that kept people from buying the listing when first listed? Look through the history and determine what needs to be done in order to make your next campaign a success.
Use Foursquare to track attendance
For an open house, there isn’t a better tool than Foursquare. Attract people to your showing by offering special incentives for those potential clients who “check in” at your listing. Better than signing in, Foursquare allows a real estate agent to collect client information that you can follow up on, on a later date.
Offer incentives for those people who “check in” at your open houses and listings
Surprisingly, you don’t have to offer big rewards for people to come check in to your open houses. Even something as simple as a ten dollar Starbucks giftcard will be enough to get looky lous out to your open house and check in giving you so much more than ten dollars advertising. For every potential client that checks in at your open house, they (on average) have 150 friends on their Facebook list that sees their check in and where it is. While the person who is checking in might only be there for a chance to win the giftcard, there might be someone on their list who is looking for the perfect four bedroom two bath in Downtown area. Foursquare allows for an incredibly penetrative passive advertising platform for your agency.
The better prizes you offer, the more people will check in, and the more people will see your listing. A small investment can pay huge divedends for you and your agency in the future if you properly manage your Foursquare contests.
Use Foursquare to leave tips for people about great places to check out in your city
Beyond your clients doing passive marketing for you, Foursquare is a great way for you to act as a concierge service for your clients at places all over the city. As a real estate agent, you want to appear that you know what you’re talking about when it comes to your town/market, so you need to be checking into places you like as well. Leave tips about where you can find the best bagel in the city, or the best place to see a movie, or where the best steak is cooked – every time you find a place that you think your clients would enjoy, “check in” at that businesses’ location and leave a tip about what they should look for or order.
Use Foursquare to complement your social media strategy, not replace it
With the Foursquare App, you can also push your updates to your Twitter and Facebook feeds adding to the amount of people who see your check ins. Use Foursquare as a complement to those other social media sites, not as a replacement. Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare all have very different uses and experiences that users expect. Twitter is for pithy updates and quickly tweeted photos (such as pictures of your listings). Facebook is for longer updates and articles for people to discuss. Foursquare is a social app for people to show their friends where they are eating dinner, going to the movies or having fun.
Take Foursquare seriously, and you can make some amazing inroads into markets that you never even knew existed! The whole idea of social media is making yourself and your business more available to people – no matter how they interact with the internet. Use every tool in front of you and you’ll soon see rewards you never dreamed of!












