Foursquare has already made its name in the world of social media as one of the platforms used to “check in” and share info with friends and family, but the startup-turned-tech giant is now trying its hand at processing big data itself.
According to reports from Tech Crunch and WebProNews.com, Foursquare is now entering the B2B world and hopes to focus more on processing and analyzing location data — which its sharing platform has been calculating and storing for users who want to “check in” at certain places and share their locations with friends on other social media sites.
In the past, social media marketing has never been a successful pathway for the B2B marketplace. Recent surveys show that about 84% of B2B marketers use some form of social media, and the average number of social media outlets used by a marketing team hovers around six, but the majority of B2B buyers still claim that they aren’t influenced by social media at all when researching a product.
Foursquare’s approach for connecting social media and B2B will be very different from the traditional marketing approach, however.
The tech company has created a Location Cloud, which stores and analyzes huge amounts of “location data” entered by individual users on the sharing platform. The Location Cloud is divided up into three main categories (Connect, Build, Analyze) and is intended to help marketers and big companies better understand their customers through analyses of location data check ins.
“Understand business and local trends like never before through Foursquare proprietary data and our larger panel of foot traffic signals,” Foursquare advertises to potential Location Cloud clients.
In the meantime, Foursquare is continuing to expand its user features, such as Places by Foursquare and Pinpoint, with the goal of incorporating more detailed information into its B2B offerings.
Additionally, there are rumors that Foursquare may be considering a possible acquisition by Yahoo in the future. Foursquare already holds a database of approximately 65 million location data points, and works with other developers like Citymaps, Microsoft, and Garmin on location data collection and analysis.