Foursquare business pages aren't limited to big brands anymorethat have the money and clout to buy Foursquare’s limited and in-demand dev resources. Business pages have become self-serve, Foursquare told the world Tuesday.
For the past 18 months, Foursquare has rolled out about 3,000 business pages in-house, relying on its team of developers and coordinating with brand creative teams along the way.
It was a time-consuming, unsustainable and restricting model for growth that limited the amount of businesses that could be “followed” on Foursquare. As a result, the location-based service tended to work with big names, such as Louis Vuitton, Zagat, The New York Times, the History Channel, Brooklyn Museum and the city of Chicago.
Now, any business can create a free Foursquare business page, enabling it to customize a branded page where their fans can “follow” the brand and unlock its special content (tips).
Foursquare’s new self-serve model for these pages will be particularly advantageous to small businesses, who now can gain from managing their venues on Foursquare, but until now have not had the ability to interact with users by leaving Foursquare tips.
The biggest improvement to the business page experience is the ability to have entire teams of people manage the same page (multiple managers). Foursquare introduced a new tool to enable brands to add multiple page “managers” to a page’s account.
Before getting started, brands should read through Foursquare’s FAQ on business pages to get an idea of what they’ll need to get started and maintain the page.
Check out Mashable‘s Foursquare page for a look at how we’ve branded it and added tips.