A world in which customers walk through the door of a business and get a coupon especially crafted for them is much closer, thanks to Foursquare.
The application, which has become the dominant player in the world of mobile, geo-specific check-ins, has unveiled a set of analytics for businesses which will put a name and a face to loyal customers.
The dashboard, which is still in alpha, is debuting for 30 select customers before a bigger roll-out. The dashboard gives businesses a look at who is checking in, breaks them down by when they come in, gender, and number of visits. Businesses will also be able to see which platform customers are using to share their status. If your visitors are heavy into Twitter or Facebook, you can follow them there. Other types of information tracked includes: total check-ins, unique visitors, male-to-female ratio, and top visitors.
Writes Zachary Wilson of Fast Company,
“With priceless data like this, it’s easy to imagine a blow-up in participating venues coming soon. More businesses means more users, more users means more businesses, and suddenly Foursquare is the Facebook of check-ins.”
Foursquare plans to add additional real-time information for business users, including weather updates. Potentially, this dashboard could be used by large chain businesses (like a Wal-Mart or Starbucks) from a central location with a view of all of their outlets in real time.
“We’ve been talking with quite a few [large corporations] who are excited about the potential for this,” said Tristan Walker, Business Development at Foursquare, in an interview with Mashable. “Once we can add purchase information on top of check-ins things can get pretty interesting.”
This valuable information helps Foursquare give itself even more distance ahead of competitors like Gowalla, and the addition of a newly designed iPhone app will give FourSquare an additional bump in users.
As the dashboard and analytics are tweaked, based on the alpha tests, plans are to introduce the service to the 1,000 or so registered businesses currently running specials on Foursquare.
![[Google]]( http://affiliatesneeded.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/easy-adsenser/google-light.gif)
