Is Foursquare Becoming the Perfect Local Ad Platform?

Local merchants that’ve ignored location-based check-in platform foursquare have just been handed a serious reason to get on board: Local Updates, the first-ever way for merchants large and small (all one million of them, currently) to communicate directly with their customers on the platform, has arrived. As of today, they’ve even begun testing the waters with Promoted Updates, a way for a business to attract new customers through paid placement (the difference: spots, matched relative to interests and activity, are only seen when you’re actively searching on the Explore tab). This, coming a month into foursquare’s strategic shift in approach—including a rebuilt mobile app (try it out if you’ve written FS off)—means that the newfound focus for the platform as a social-exploration tool is as much about enabling richer user-to-user interactions as about enabling richer business-to-customer and customer-to-business interactions.