Editor’s note: This post is being preserved for reference and posterity, but the data, branding, and statistics it contains may have changed since publication. Happy reading!
I was wrong about Foursquare.
While five of my 2013 local search prognostications came to fruition, my sixth prediction—that Foursquare would be bought—doesn’t look like it will (unless Apple has silently acquired Foursquare in the last couple of days).
In fact, Foursquare has been turning away from an acquisition path, setting off on a fundraising spree in 2013. While this quest for cash has struck some analysts as a desperate tactic, PR from the company indicates that it remains focused on growing its userbase and its revenues for the foreseeable future. It’s one of the few companies in tech to successfully address both sides of the merchant and consumer marketplace, and as a result, might even have a chance at an IPO.
As the company matures, we hear less and less about mayorships, badges, and social gamification—perhaps a tacit admission that checkins are indeed dying as the motivational factor underlying usage of Foursquare.
Foursquare: the data aggregator
Instead, the company is pivoting into a self-described position as “the location layer for the Internet.”
Google, Bing, Nokia, and other mapping companies have built their own much broader location layers to varying degrees of success, but it’s the human activity associated with location data that makes Foursquare unique. Its growing database of keyword-rich tips and comments and widening network of social interactions even make predictive recommendations possible.
But I’m considerably less excited about these consumer-facing recommendations than I am about Foursquare’s data play. If “location layer for the internet” is not a synonym for “data aggregator,” I’m not sure what would be.
In the last several months, Foursquare has been prompting its users to provide business details about the places they check-in at, like whether a business has wi-fi, its relative price range, delivery and payment options, and more. It’s also accumulating one of the biggest photo libraries in all of local search. For companies that have not yet built their own services like StreetView and Mapmaker, Foursquare “ground truth” position is enviable.
So from my standpoint, Foursquare’s already achieved the status of a major data aggregator, and seems to have its sights set on becoming the data aggregator.
Foursquare: The Data Aggregator?
That statement would have sounded preposterous 18 months ago, with “only” 15 million users and 250,000 claimed venues.
But while many of us in the local search space have been distracted by the shiny objects of Google+ Local (editor’s note: now known as “Google My Business”) and Facebook Graph Search, Foursquare has struck deals with the two largest up-and-coming social apps (Instagram and Pinterest) to provide the location backbone for their geolocation features. Not to mention Uber, WhatsApp, and a host of other conversational and transactional apps.
And buried in the December 5th TechCrunch article about Foursquare’s latest iOS release was this throwaway line:
“Foursquare has a sharing deal with Apple already — it’s one of over a dozen contributors to Apple’s Maps data.”
So, doing some quick math, we have
All of a sudden that’s a substantial number of people contributing location information to Foursquare. Granted, there’s considerable overlap in those users, but even a conservative 80-100 million would be a pretty large number of touchpoints.
In fact, one thing that Wil Reynolds and I realized at a recent get-together in San Diego is that for many people outside the tech world, Foursquare and Instagram are basically the same app (see screenshots below). I’m seeing more and more of my decidedly non-techie Instagram friends tagging their photos with location. And avid Foursquare users like Matthew Brown have always made photography their primary network activity.
Providing the geographic foundation for two apps—Pinterest and Instagram—that are far more popular than Foursquare gives it a strong running start on laying the location foundation for the Internet.
What’s next for Foursquare?
While Facebook is undoubtedly building its own location layer, Zuckerberg and company have long ignored local search. And they’ve got plenty of other short- and mid-term priorities. Exposing Facebook check-in data to the extent Foursquare has, and forcing Instagram to update a very successful API integration, would seem to be pretty far down the list.
As I suggested in my Local Search Ecosystem update in August, to challenge established players like Infogroup, Neustar, and Acxiom, in the long run Foursquare does need to build out its index considerably beyond the current sweetspots of food, drink, and entertainment.
But in the short run, the quality and depth of Foursquare’s popular venue information in major cities gives start-up app developers everything they need to launch and attract users to their apps. And Foursquare’s independence from Google, Facebook, and Apple is appealing for many of them—particularly for non-U.S. app developers who have a hard time finding publicly-available location databases outside of Google or Facebook.
Foursquare’s success with Instagram and Pinterest has created a self-perpetuating growth strategy: it will continue to be the location API of choice for most “hot” local startups.
TL;DR
Foursquare venues have been contributing to a business’s citation profile for years, so hopefully most of you have included venue creation and management in your local SEO service packages already. Even if you optimize non-retail locations like insurance agencies, accounting offices, and the like, make one of your 2014 New Year’s resolutions be a higher level of engagement with Foursquare.
The bottom line is that irrespective of its user growth and beyond just SEO, Foursquare is going to get more important to the SoLoMo ecosystem in the coming year.
