The successful course of Foursquare: User participation and User stickiness

Article Description: Foursquare product path: Execution urges it to seize every opportunity.

The author of this article AJ Arora is a former Yahoo! technician and a loyal user of Foursquare. In the authors ' eyes, all successful products run through the same philosophy: Identify product opportunities, and then create products to seize these opportunities. In the article, the author takes a product manager's field of vision to carefully comb the foursquare to seize several opportunities. We can get a glimpse of Foursquare's successful course and inspiration.

1999: Mobile Browser and SMS

After seeing the opportunity for mobile browsers and SMS, Dennis Crowley the "check-in" feature and began building a mobile social network called Dodgeball around Check-in. The service was bought by Google for 2005 years, but Dodgeball was forced to stop because of lack of support. Dennis and co-founder Alex Rainert had to quit.

APP Store and SDK

The 2007 Apple iphone was just half the smartphone revolution, and the other half was the 2008 iOS SDK release. Mobile applications Create new user behaviors, and new user behaviors create huge product opportunities. The usual things like getting to a local bar and restaurant are also a game.

The time to "sign in" is ripe for creation. Services such as BrightKite, Fireball and loopt continue to extend dodgeball work, while Dennis and new partners Naveen consider reprocessing for iOS platforms.

Twitter

Like all new services, Foursquare also needs users. Twitter's dazzling star on SXSW has been widely reported, but there are still a lot of people who don't understand what's going on. Foursquare sees it as a marketing opportunity to seamlessly sync "check-in" and "achievement" to Twitter. Early adopters may recall that the Twitter stream was filled with Foursquare check-in. Foursquare will regularly adjust the joint strategy of the channel (from Twitter to Facebook) to push notifications--to keep a balance between junk information and good marketing.

Gaming

The Foursquare has three basic gaming mechanisms that attract disparate user groups and are critical to user involvement and user stickiness success.

1. The early adopters of the insignia –foursquare rarely bring their entire social spectrum to the site. In the absence of any interaction between friends, Foursquare users gain personal success by collecting badges-so they can have a good engagement in their first relatively "lonely" experience.

2. Title of Mayor – after a large number of users, "No friends" users can interact with strangers and participate in it. Strangers to each other Foursquare users compete for a place of "mayor" title, occupy territory, businesses can also build loyalty.

3. Social competition – most users have enough friends to form social profiles before users get tired of badges. The level of competition and titles has become a new concern. At the same time, "to know the location of friends" can attract users who are tired of the game.

The crowdsourcing in the LBS competition

At the end of 2010, a comprehensive war on lbs was brewing.

When people went to Google or Yelp to find phone calls or lengthy reviews, Foursquare focused on simplifying social interaction and location creation (venue-creation), and getting unexpected growth in some places overseas. The most enthusiastic position recommender (venue-curators) will get "superuser" status, and they can spend time on the fine-tuning location database.

Today, more than half of Foursquare's users are not in the United States, with a fairly active user base in south-East Asia, while its main rivals have no explicit entry plans.

In 2010, Yahoo!, Facebook and Microsoft extended an olive branch to Foursquare to buy 1-1, 500 million dollars at a time when Foursquare had only a mere 1 million users. It's worth more than 100 dollars to each user, which is unprecedented in the field of lbs.

Business platform and Special offers

Instead of blindly recruiting a large number of ground troops into the daily group deal, Foursquare chose to bypass the war and once again use their enthusiastic community. Businesses can create their own ex-gratia products, maintain profits, and direct contact with customers.

In this way, the territory of Foursquare value creation is complete – from location-based gaming to creating real value for users.

Brand

The number of successful solutions for small businesses is growing, and branding businesses are just around the corner-and this will push Foursquare into the mainstream.

Brand-name badges, tips and promotions that make Foursquare businesses and users stronger than any other network (note: This is debatable)-and it's hard to see that users will feel like they're the object of an ad bombing.

Foursquare's focus on the "real world" may also have led to its "value per impression" higher than any other social network. Compared to the number of users who spend hours surfing the internet, their mobile phone users are more likely to "go outside and do something".

Old question: "What do you want to do?" ”

After last week's Foursquare update, its recommendations were much smarter than before. Now the obvious thing about me is Foursquare, which is the most important factor in making a profit in today's social arena.

After the update, Foursquare can also explore places beyond the current location-a direct threat to Yelp and google--and, in the near future, Foursquare's location will be prominently visible in the search business results.

Some might think that the incident was more accidental rather than deliberate, and here I changed the remark of Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuckerberg in social networking: "If you can invent Foursquare, you have all invented Foursquare." ”

Their success is also clearly inseparable from other details, such as excellent design, gritty business/development/PR, and extensive marketing in big events. But to take the top prize in the most competitive area of lbs, not follow Gowalla, and everyone thinks they will succumb to Facebook, they choose to devote themselves wholeheartedly to the implementation of the product.