Tag: Foursquare

Foursquare Super Duper Swarm Badge

I am currently attending SIME in Stockholm and the first presentation this morning was by Josh Williams, CEO and co-founder of Gowalla. I hope to write down some thoughts on that later.

But that reminded me of my visit to Vienna this weekend. During the World Blogging Forum 2010, more than 500 people checked in on Foursquare at the same time. This earned all of us the much desired Super Duper Swarm Badge. So at least among the bloggers at the event in Vienna, Foursquare was the clear leder in the location-based services race.

The next level is the Epic Swarm Badge when 1,000 people check in to a venue on Foursquare. That’s a tad bit harder to achieve.

TV brands are the most followed brands on Foursquare

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.

foursquare

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:

  1. Bravo (tv)
  2. MTV (tv)
  3. Zagat Survey
  4. History (tv)
  5. Bastard Jeans
  6. VH1 (tv)
  7. Bon Appétit Magazine
  8. TLC (tv)
  9. Wall Street Journal
  10. The New York Times

Create a Heat Map of Your Foursquare Checkins

Are you using Foursquare to check in at different places? Then you can use WhereDoYouGo.net to illustrate where you check in most frequently. By letting the site fetch your Foursquare history it plots out a heatmap of your favorite places, like mine below from Stockholm city.

If you are going all in on transparency, you can also create a map that periodically updates itself.

heatmap-foursquare

Foursquare comes to Stockholm

foursquare Foursquare is a location-based social network with gaming elements, and it is the latest hype among tech savvy social media users. Its mobile app lets you check-in at different venues and find out where your friends are. Today the site added 15 new European cities (not 14 as published on TechCrunch) to the two existing, London and Amsterdam. Stockholm is one of the new cities that is available as of today. The other cities are Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Dublin, Helsinki, Geneva, Madrid, Munich, Manchester, Paris, Prague and Rome.

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