Foursquare, the location based service that enables users to check-in and share locations with their friends, is growing at an amazing pace. The company markets itself as a game where participants earn points and badges based on location and frequency of their check-ins. The platform, with upwards of 1.7 million users, is growing by 100,000 users every week. With its tremendous growth are new and creative uses for sharing location and events with friends.

By early 2010, Foursquare established partnerships with major brands such as Bravo TV, awarding badges to users who checked-in to locations associated with Bravo’s television shows. More recently, the city of Chicago partnered with the platform to boost tourism across the city by creating special badges themed around various city attractions. We expect to see an increase in the number of events promoted through the platform, even if they span multiple locations.

This past weekend, Seattle celebrated Pride Week. The city hosted parties, concerts and happenings in various locations on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Thousands of people attended the festivities. People were checking-in all over Seattle to the specific venues that they chose to attend. Foursquare users could also check-in to the Seattle Pride Festival in general, no matter where they were celebrating. Using Foursquare to promote events is a novel way to generate hype and incentive to attend events. Just as businesses provide incentive for customer loyalty by providing deals to Foursquare users, promoters have the ability to do the same with events.

In addition, as more people join Foursquare, it can be a powerful way for event organizers to judge attendance rates and potentially gather information about who is attending, across multiple locations. Since Foursquare locations are open sourced, users are encouraged to add new locations to the database. This feature of the platform makes it incredibly simple for anyone to add their event as a Foursquare destination.

We love to see creative new uses for location based social media platforms, and think this is just the beginning. Have you come across a new application of an already existing platform that got you excited? Share with us!

By Emily Gibian

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