Foursquare Marketing: 7 Hot Tips for 2012

Every minute, 2000 people are checking in using Foursquare, one of the internet's hottest social media apps. While Foursquare started out being useful only for people on mobile phones, they have recently expanded to allow non-member searches and have integrated with several other social media platforms. This makes Foursquare marketing one of the biggest new waves for law firms who want to get the most out of their local targeting strategies. Here are seven tips to get you off to a great start in using Foursquare to market your legal business.

Foursquare Marketing Tip #1: Leave Relevant Tips

“Tips” on Foursquare let people know what a previous visitor from Foursquare thought about a location. You can use tips in several different ways to help your law firm marketing efforts. For instance, let's say that you're in a city like New York, where many legal cases have begun. You could give tips about certain locations that indicated when those locations were important in court battles.

Another way that you can use tips is to actually help people out who might need to go to courtroom buildings. Leaving tips about how to navigate the courtroom buildings and who to talk to for what problems can be a good idea. Other attorneys can base their tips on their specialty areas. For example, if you're a disability attorney, you may want to provide tips on accessibility at courthouses and other public or private buildings.

Foursquare Marketing Tip #2: Claim Your Space

One of the first and best things you can do for your Foursquare marketing efforts is to claim your location on Foursquare and start editing the information there. You can add your hours, information about the services your law firm offers, and any other information that you think people would find relevant.

Don't forget to create photos of your law firm offices and some of the people who work in them. Foursquare's system allows you to upload these photos, and they can help people understand what to expect from your office before heading in.

Foursquare Marketing Tip #3: Network With Other Attorneys with Foursquare

You don't need to think of Foursquare marketing as exclusively B2C oriented. If you want to improve networking opportunities with other attorneys, which can help you get more client referrals, consider using Foursquare to help. You can use Foursquare to see who's in your vicinity right now, and if you see that person, you can begin to get connected.

This is a great reason to get a personal Foursquare account to use for marketing as well as a law firm business account when you sign up. When you meet someone else using Foursquare, you've already got something in common to start a conversation about—and that makes it easier to break the ice and start networking.

Foursquare Marketing Tip #4: Offer a Freebie

The efficacy of this Foursquare marketing tip is sometimes in doubt. Law firms often don't want to offer anything for free, because they worry that people will visit their firm office, take whatever is free, and leave. The trick to making this Foursquare marketing tip work for you is to pick something that meets two criteria for your giveaway: it should be interesting to the kind of users that Foursquare has, and it should be relatively cheap (think less than $7-10).

A medical office has had good luck giving away bottles of hot sauce, which come labeled not only with the normal label but also a label that mentions their office name and address. This is a great idea—hot sauce bottles usually stick around in someone's fridge for months, meaning that your ad will be in front of them every time they open their fridge or spice up their meals for a long time, as long as you make sure the product is high quality enough that it doesn't get trashed on the first day.

Foursquare Marketing Tip #5: Express Yourself

Your brand image should be consistent over every social media platform you use. You don't want to project one type of image on your law firm's website, then use completely different branding tactics for your social media sites. This kind of disjointed web presence can make you look directionless or even like you're simply grubbing for whatever customers you can find, using whatever lines you can use. Not the best image for lawyers—so pick your brand image and stick with it.

If you want to create a change, have it ready to roll out over a very short time across all your branding platforms, including Foursquare. This will ensure that you can get a fresh look without sacrificing a consistent brand image.

Foursquare Marketing Tip #6: Train Your Law Office Staff on Foursquare

Your Foursquare marketing efforts will be more successful if more people at your office know and understand Foursquare. You don't want a Foursquare user checking in at your office and talking about the service to someone who clearly has no idea what the user is talking about. Since Foursquare is a consumer product that doesn't have a steep learning curve, a simple mini-training in your law offices can make sure that everyone is up to speed on your Foursquare marketing efforts and how to most effectively make use of the service and bring in Foursquare users.

Foursquare Marketing Tip #7: Market Foursquare In Your Office

Make sure that inside your office, you have some indicators that you are a Foursquare user. Having some mentions of Foursquare within the office can make it so that more people who are already visiting might be interested in signing up for Foursquare, giving you more people who can help you to get out your marketing message with the service. Foursquare marketing will become more effective with every person at your law office that you can get to become an active member.