How to Add Foursquare to Your PR Arsenal

The job of any successful PR professional is to keep abreast of all the new and emerging technologies that will help them become more successful. With so many social media tools out there, the challenge for most is to decide which tools makes the most sense to use and will provide the best results.

Foursquare is one such social network application that is rapidly growing in popularity, even more so since Facebook launched its own location-based service, Facebook Places. If you aren’t familiar with Foursquare, it connects users and allows them to broadcast their locations using their mobile devices.

Foursquare is especially attractive because it allows communicators to tie their programs to physical point-of-sale activities—something that has proven to be difficult to accomplish in the broader social Web.

So far, Foursquare has proven to be most effective in the food and beverage, hospitality and entertainment industries—spaces that have brick-and-mortar destinations. But having a bar or restaurant isn’t a requirement; PR pros are experimenting using Foursquare for one-off and recurring events, too.