Foursquare Mayorship: Healthy Competition for Employees who 'Check-In'

A little healthy competition never hurt anyone. In fact, one could say it even increases performance. At the PageLadder office we are always duking it out for who is the Mayor of PageLadder’s downtown San Diego office. As a matter of fact, I just ‘ousted’ Robb as mayor today which inspired this blog post. By having this healthy competition going on we constantly remind each other to ‘check-in’ and have grown the equity in our personal foursquare accounts at the same time as our business on foursquare. If your business has employees each of them could be good for up 20-30 check-ins per month which compounds quickly if you have multiple employees. You might want to consider encouraging them to start to check-in as many authorities in the Local SEO have been stating it will become more important in 2013 and beyond.

And just to speculate a little bit, because I love to speculate, going forward I also think we’re going to see Google potentially integrating some offline information into the local rankings. So what do I mean by that? As we get more and more comfortable, we as a society get more and more comfortable with things like Foursquare check-ins or Facebook check-ins, using our phones to make mobile payments, using Google Wallet, or companies like Square or LevelUp, these types of things, loyalty programs, Google has acquired a company several years ago that focused on digital loyalty cards, these types of offline signals about how we’re actually engaging with businesses in the real world, I think there’s no reason that they wouldn’t try to incorporate those into their local rankings going forward. –David Mihm

Seasoned or Active Accounts Have More Power

If you only check-in at your office or place of work then your foursquare account is not going to have much weight behind it. I’ve found that by starting to check in at my office naturally I start to check in at places around it. I watched myself become more comfortable with ‘checking-in’ at various places over time which has allowed me to grow my personal foursquare account some good equity. Now when I check in at a business and leave a tip my account is more ‘trusted’ and packs a bigger punch. This is ideal for sending local signals to Google about where a business is located but probably didn’t really matter when I ‘checked-in’ at the Pacific Ocean on my sailboat the other day.

What it Means to be Mayor

Since becoming more active on my personal foursquare account I have reaped all kinds of rewards. The other day I became mayor of The Old Townhouse restaurant in Ocean Beach San Diego and now I get free coffee as long as I am mayor. Did I mention they have really good bottomless black coffee? Not a bad deal right?

After holding the mayorship for a few weeks at another business, South Coast Surf Shop where I stop by for weekly meetings, I was ousted by one of the employees. She took the time to rub it in that she was now the mayor and I’m never getting it back. It’s really not fair that she works there everyday but hey, it’s all in good fun.

The Outlook of ‘Check-Ins’

Foursquare keeps track of how many check-ins every business has. They also keep track of how many different people have checked-in to a business. Additionally they keep track of which cell phone towers the mobile check-in came from to help geo-locate or geo-position that business on the map. All important items to a business looking to be found online and on the map. You can ‘check-in’ on other platforms besides foursquare like Google+, Facebook and Yelp. Personally I keep my checking-in to foursquare and yelp since it’s quick on my iphone and doesn’t junk up my feeds. Times are changing and get on board now and get ahead of your competition. One day the Better Business Bureau will bow down to the power in numbers that comes with the new social economy we are already experiencing.

Do you reward your the Mayor of your business? Perhaps it is about time you do!