Traditional media make up the majority of most followed brands on the location-based service Foursquare. Metro, the global daily newspaper of Swedish origin, is one of the 30 most followed brands, for example. More specifically, it is the Canadian arm of Metro that holds that position, with in excess of 9,000 friends on Foursquare. By following Metro News, users can find tips and places that Metro recommends and they can also unlock a Metro Foursquare Badge.
According to Fanpagelist.com, the most followed brand on Foursquare is Bravo TV, with 70,000 friends, which is not a whole lot out of a total user base of 3 million.
A blog post on Aboutfoursquare.com suggests that there are two main reasons why not more people follow brand on Foursquare. First, the site doesn’t do a good enough job promoting sponsored badges, leaving brands with the only option to market them through their own channels. The second reason has to do with privacy concerns. Most people aren’t very fond of the idea of letting brands know where they check in.
As you can see, the top 10 list of brands on Foursquare are dominated by traditional media and especially tv shows/stations:
- Bravo (tv)
- MTV (tv)
- Zagat Survey
- History (tv)
- Bastard Jeans
- VH1 (tv)
- Bon Appétit Magazine
- TLC (tv)
- Wall Street Journal
- The New York Times