Carmine Gallo, author of The Power of Foursquare, knows that foursquare promotions are a great way to attract people to your business, but they can backfire if they’re not executed well. In the webinar – The Power of foursquare – Carmine gives you five common foursquare promotion pitfalls to avoid:
- No employee training: When you check in using foursquare and the employees have no idea about the promotions, that’s the worst thing possible. I can’t tell you how often this happens. Be sure to train your employees on foursquare and update them on promotions.
- Lame specials: I once went to a winery in California, and they had a foursquare special. Every fifth check in, you get 5% off. Think about that. How many times do I go to a winery? Five times? I was just visiting the area. Five times and get five percent? Five percent doesn’t even cover the sales tax in California! That’s just lame and disappointing. So, if you’re going to entice people, give them something interesting.
- Ignoring your mayor: The mayor is your most important, loyal customer. Don’t ignore the mayor, because when people check in and they check in enough to be the mayor of your place, they want to be rewarded with something extra special. It’s these rewards that motivate others to check in.
- Poor customer service: If your customer service is already not up to par and people are complaining about customer service on Twitter and other social media networks, don’t invite them to experience your bad service on foursquare. Get your customer service right first.
- Doing it just to do it: This happens quite a bit with every new social media tool. People jump on it. They’re really crazy about it for about two weeks and then they just let it go. So every once in a while, I’ll check into places and think, “Hey, there’s a great special here,” only to discover that it expired six months ago and nobody checked it. Don’t use foursquare just to say you’re using it. If you’re going to jump into social media, then jump in and have fun.
Click here to access The Power of Foursquare webinar from On-Demand Learning. Click here to securely purchase Carmine Gallo’s book, The Power of Foursquare. This article was co-authored by Elizabeth Rowe. Elizabeth graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (English Literature) at the ANU and a Masters of Media Practice at the University of Sydney. She is currently completing an internship with the Australian Businesswomen’s Network.
