Pages and Custom Badges - that help lead your consumers and fans to do interesting things in their neighborhoods and communities.
For those Brands not tied to a physical location foursquare offers brand pages and partner badges as promotional tools.
These tools are more for larger brands that already have a huge following outside foursquare. It is not a platform for small businesses to build their brand awareness. Some brands that successfully use foursquare are Bravo TV, Louis Vuitton, The New York Times, Microsoft Windows Live, the History Channel, Syracuse University and Red Bull.
Foursquare is very selective about adding new pages and badges to their site. You could be an agency, a brand owner, agency on behalf of a brand a retailer, an event or event Organizer to request a page.
Foursquare Pages are your custom homepage on foursquare, the epicenter of all brand engagement. Your fans can “follow” your Page (similar to on Twitter), allowing them to see Tips you’ve left around the world. Your Page can be customized to include your brand imagery, links to other websites, and can be located at a custom URL for your brand (“www.foursquare.com/yourbrand”).
Currently foursquare does not have an online tool to create a brand pages on your own. These are made manually at the request of partners and it may take about two weeks to set your page up.
After your Page is set up, the brand can start leaving Tips for its followers. A foursquare Tip is a nugget of information tied to a location. When one a follower checks in nearby, the tip will pop up on their screen.
Tips should be interesting, clever, and worthwhile nuggets of information (like a tweet) tied to a specific location. Here are some examples of tips. The New York Times guided their foursquare followers to the best spots to visit while in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics and The History Channel used Tips to leave historical factoids around the country in advance of its America: The Story of Us miniseries.
Another tool available to brands is the partner badge. Partner badges are rewards for exploration, but tied to your objectives as a brand. For example: Zagat awards badges to users who frequent Zagat rated restaurants and Toys’R’Us created a badge to reward loyal holiday shoppers with Black Friday discounts.
This is a pilot program and foursquare is very selective about the brands they partner with.
