Sendible Blog

What is Foursquare?

If you’re not familiar with Foursquare, here’s a brief description from BusinessInsider.com

“Foursquare is primarily for letting your friends know where you are and figuring out where they are.

Secondarily, it’s for collecting points, prize “badges,” and eventually, coupons, for going about your everyday business.

 

Why Foursquare is great for marketing your business?

Users of Foursquare are made up of two groups – (1) consumers going about their everyday business and (2) local businesses. Consumers love Foursquare for two reasons:

1. They get to check in at different places and accumulate points as they striving to become “Mayor” of a particular venue. The mayor of a venue is someone who has visited that place most often.
2. When they check in at a new place, they’re instantly notified of tips and special about the place they’re visiting.

Businesses love Foursquare because they can attract visitors to their venues by offering promotions and specials for people who check in at their venue. 

Below is a screen shot, showing local information:

How to get your business on Foursquare

It’s easy to get your local business or venue added to Foursquare. Here’s how:

1. Register for an account at Foursquare.com.
2. Click Add Things in the menu at the top right.
3. Click Add a new venue and enter your venue details.

Now what?

Now that your business has been added to the Foursquare database, you can gain exposure in the following ways:

1. When Foursquare users visit your venue and check in on their phones, they’ll see a list of tips and specials added by other visitors or your business itself. 
2. They’ll be able to see what other visitors to your bar/restaurant/shop have purchased before or recommended and could follow suit.
3. Friends of these visitors will see that their friend has just visited your business and may be prompted to pay your venue a visit too.
4. Other people seeking to become the mayor of your venue and accumulate badges will pay your venue a visit just to accumulate the status.

Using Foursquare with Sendible

The easiest way to promote your business on Foursquare is with Sendible. You can use Sendible in 2 ways:

• To add tips about your venue to Foursquare (Sendible is great for schedule your Foursquare tips on a one-off or recurring basis).
• Read and respond to what visitors to your venue/business are saying.

Linking Sendible to Foursquare

To link up your Sendible and Foursquare accounts, do the following:

1. Sign in to Sendible and open up Add/Edit Services.
2. You’ll find a new category called “Location-based Services”. Click “Add” next to the “Foursquare Venue tip” service.
3. Enter your business’s address and select it from the drop down list. If it’s not in the list, make sure you’ve added your business as a venue in Foursquare.
4. Save settings.

Posting Tips to Foursquare from Sendible

After linking up your Foursquare account and your venue, you can now post tips about your venue to Foursquare. You can do this from the Message Box by selecting your Foursquare account from the services list. Type your tip into the text area below and click Send to post it. Tips can also be scheduled using Sendible’s scheduling functionality.

Reading and responding to posts about your venue

You can read and respond what people are saying about your venue from the Feeds tab in the Message Box page. If you find a post you’d like to respond to, simply click on it and it will open up the Compose tab of the Message Box, ready for you to respond.

Sendible is a social media marketing tool used by agencies, companies and individuals to help them engage with customers, monitor what’s being said about their brands and track results. For a free account, visit http://sendible.com or take a tour here.

Scheduled tweets should be used to compliment your regular tweeting activities and not replace them. Nice discussion from @DanAndJennifer.

Create a free Sendible blog this week, and we’ll feature you on the Sendible homepage. For inspiration, see http://bit.ly/aPYOfO.

We’re excited to announce a new Sendible feature – the ability to post interactive flash wall posts and greeting cards on Facebook.

You can choose one of our standard ecards or add your own branded one. It’s a fantastic way to make your message stand out on your contacts’ Facebook walls.

Here’s how to post an electronic greeting card to Facebook from Sendible:

1. Click on Add eCard.

2. You’ll see a dialog with a selection of eCards that can be selected.

3. Select the eCard you’d like to attach to your message and click the Attach button.

4. Select your Facebook contact by selecting Social Network Message and entering your contact’s name.

5. You can schedule your eCard to be sent at a specific time, or you can just send it immediately.

6. Your eCard appears on your friend’s wall as a Sendible eCard.

We’ve added support for link previews to Sendible - similar to how link previews work in Facebook.

You can now preview the images you want to post from within Sendible.

To do this, click on the URL link and you’ll see a button that says “Load images from URL”. You’ll be able to see the link preview (as you would in Facebook) and select the image to attach. This will ensure that you always have a link preview alongside your posts.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added the ability to monitor what’s being said about your brand online. Now you can see exactly what’s being said about your brand on blogs, microblogs, social networks and in comments.

1. Read mentions from across the web

2. Monitor Daily Buzz about your brand

3. Keep of track of the users that are talking about your brand the most

We’re excited to announce Google Buzz support for Sendible. Now you can automate and schedule your Google buzzes!  http://bit.ly/cUGj2l

A popular feature request by Sendible users was the ability to add support for Facebook Groups. Facebook Groups were the easiest way to share items of common interest with your friends and were the Facebook standard before Fan Pages came along.

Sendible has supported Facebook Fan Pages for a while now, but a lot of users have not yet made the transition from Fan Pages to Groups, so we decided to include the feature.

The steps required to post to Facebook Groups from Sendible are really simple.

1. Visit Add/Edit Services and add settings for Facebook Groups.

2. Sendible will automatically connect to Facebook for you and pull in all the groups you belong to. Select a group, enter your details and save your settings.

3. Return to the Message Box and you’ll now see your Facebook Group listed in your services. Select the Facebook Group and you can now go ahead and post a mesasge or image to your group. You can also schedule your post to go off at a later date or time.

When it comes to updating all your social networks at once, Sendible makes it extremely easy! You can post updates to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn by logging into Sendible and typing a message – or you can reach these sites by sending a single email to Sendible.

Below are the 3 steps needed to set this up:

1. Click on My Groups and create a group to hold the social network accounts you’d like to post to.

2. Add the accounts you’d like to post to and make a note of the email address that you can use to reach your social networks in your group.

3. Send an email from your email client to the special email address provided and Sendible will post to all the accounts in the group.

Source: Soshable.com