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As Foursquare moves to compete in the local search space, how does it differentiate from other local search sites like Yelp?
We take a look at the rebranding of Foursquare, and how it directly affects your business.
Last week Foursquare revealed a sneak peek into the repositioning of their brand as a personalized, local search engine on its blog. Nothing communicates their focus on local quite as much as their redesigned logo, featuring a super-hero “F” within a map pin.
This positions them in direct competition with Yelp and leads us all to wonder if the local search world is big enough for the both of them.
How Foursquare is Changing
Foursquare launched in 2009 as a social networking site that allowed you to share your location with friends. Early on, growth was explosive—but times have changed. Whether fueled by investors (as some have speculated) or not, a few years of slow growth necessitated change.
Foursquare was branded among users as a check-in engine despite always having had a comparable feature set to Yelp, where users were able to review businesses and comment on places, share photos, and access coupons.
Although few users were aware, Foursquare has always been a powerful local search engine—inputting “Wi-Fi” in a Foursquare search box would yield a list of Wi-Fi enabled spots nearby. This “repositioning” in the search engine market is clearly an effort to rebrand than to rebuild.
What is Swarm?
Shifting from a check-in focus, Foursquare announced the move of check-in functionality to a new Swarm app in May of this year, leaving everyone in suspense about what would become of Foursquare until last week. Swarm has had a rough road with consumers, earning only 1.5 Stars in iTunes and 3.5 stars in Google Play.
According to the Foursquare blog, a Windows app can be expected within weeks. Foursquare claims to be responding to this feedback with application updates, as detailed in their blog’s Swarm roadmap. While Swarm faces an uphill battle, Foursquare opens up opportunities at scale.
Fuzzy Math
Foursquare has more potential as a local search engine than a check-in engine, but how does it stack up against Yelp? At the moment, it’s nearly impossible to tell. Foursquare has grown to include 50 million members, according to their Foursquare's own numbers, whereas Yelp boasted 112 million unique visits last month, according to Quantcast. But these are fuzzy numbers.
The reported 112 million is inclusive of web and mobile web traffic, but does not include Yelp’s mobile app traffic. Yelp’s count also includes multiple visits from unique visitors, and those who access Yelp from multiple platforms.
This over-attribution happens because you do not need a registered account in order to use Yelp, so unregistered users who use the site repeatedly are treated as unique visitors each time they use Yelp. Plus, how can we ignore the fact that Apple chose Yelp to power Siri? According to Forbes, Siri has been driving Yelp traffic since 2012.
Foursquare’s count of 50 million members is presumed to be a unique, registered user total across all platforms—an accurate measure of its life-to-date users who have logged onto Foursquare at least once.
However, this count tells us nothing about Foursquare’s active user base—it is unknown just how many of those 50 million users have left their usernames and passwords on a shelf collecting dust. In conclusion, the numbers do little to help us understand the competitive landscape—so let’s examine how Foursquare competes.
How Foursquare Can Beat Yelp
There are many ways in which Foursquare can dominate Yelp and last week’s announcement hits on many of them. Given release screenshots, it appears as though Foursquare knows user interface and user experience are a Yelp weakness. Foursquare will provide a cleaner, prettier user interface than Yelp.
Foursquare
Yelp
Foursquare promises to perform better than Yelp does—quite simply, because it always has. Foursquare’s search engine yields relevant results regarding the details of a location. For example, search “gluten-free” to find a local spot where you can find foods that match your dietary needs.
Yet Yelp returns a result set that merely scans the basic text contained within store names, category tags, or reviews. Yelp can match locations to high-level categories, but not to the location details that may be most relevant to your user experience.
Foursquare also has a reputation built on trust, while Yelp continues to suffer from fake review scandals. In 2013, Forbes reported that Yelp had been combatting the fake review problem since its inception in 2004. For this reason alone, many people, like out-spoken consultant and angel investor Peter Shankman, bet on Yelp’s demise by 2015, according to Fast Company.
Bringing the Personal to Local
The Foursquare relaunch also boasts the ability to personalize user’s local searches based on preferences, a feature missing from Yelp. Foursquare isn’t building this from the ground up—with five years of location-based data tied to individuals to sift through, Foursquare certainly has plenty of “big data” to take a more personalized approach to local search.
Personalization drives repeat engagement with applications. Just think of your favorite airline and its application installed on your phone that lets you check-in and see your frequent flyer miles. You’d certainly keep coming back for more, right? No matter where the fuzzy math lands, personalization will surely give Foursquare the advantage, assuming they get the formula right.
Foursquare & Your Brand
If Foursquare has the capacity to beat Yelp, and it does, your brand should be there. With over 1.7 million businesses using Foursquare’s Merchant Platform prior to this media bonanza, businesses need to use Foursquare Business to ensure listing accuracy as a part of their local search optimization efforts.
A business can touch a customer by having updated, accurate information on Foursquare, or engage on a level deeper by using Foursquare Business to promote store offers. On a personal level, encourage and train store staff to engage with consumers about providing reviews and feedback on Foursquare and Yelp.