Flixity Blog

Foursquare has confirmed that it expects to register its five millionth user this week. This doesn’t sound like an awful lot of users world wide but just consider this, last March (as the company turned one), it had a mere half a million users. By April this had doubled to 1 million. Five million just a few months on equals a much faster rate of growth than Twitter at the same stage of its development!

So what’s it all about? Foursquare is a location-based social networking tool. You can ‘check in’ to places and in doing so you allow your friends and followers know where you are. The more you use it- the more badges you earn. Whoopty-doo I hear you say?? Even if you’re not too thrilled at the prospect of collecting badge icons to display proudly on your user page, don’t dismiss the whole concept just yet. For both individuals and businesses alike, there’s more to Foursquare than first meets the eye.

As an individual the real benefit of using Foursquare is to get insider tips and to be privy to the best bargains in town. When you ‘check in’ you can view tips about wherever you are. This is great. Previous visitors to that bar/restaurant/store may have left some great words of advice behind for you to benefit from eg. ask for the special sauce! You can learn from other’s experiences – what they recommend on the menu or what they suggest you avoid! Of course you can also leave tips, be the critic, have your say. Flixity have posted  tips about all our favourite places!

This is how users contribute, venues however also make Foursquare a worthwhile tool by posting special offers along with their listing. Deals and discounts may pop up when you check in, or even if you are checking in somewhere else in the vicinity of the venue. Just imagine you get an offer message on Foursquare from a coffee place nearby, you pop along, show the barista a secret code on your phone et voila….a free coffee. The non Foursquare users behind you are left scratching their heads. It’s a great way to entice custom in!

Many venues also now give special offers to their mayor. The mayor is the Foursquare user with the most check-ins at a venue. By giving this discount or deal not only is the venue rewarding loyalty…their also spurring on competition between regulars to earn this coveted title. Earning, stealing or retaining the title means they will simply have to visit more often….not bad for business eh!

Foursquare has immense potential. From a venue’s perspective it’s free advertising directly to the palm of a potential customer. For the user it is an insider’s guidebook to the world compiled by the masses, catering to all. The more people and businesses that get on board and contribute the more valuable a resource it will become. Be one of the estimated 18,000 people that will register today. Flixity always loves a new friend on Foursquare!

Not only is a Flixity video an appealing, enticing advert for your business, it also has great impact on your site’s effectiveness. It improves SEO,  increases visitors and leads to more sales.

People are 80% more likely to purchase a product or service, when presented with video, over text and pictures.

People are 5 times more likely to engage & explore a website when provided with video versus pictures and text only site.

The experts at Bruceclay.com (one of the top SEO firms in the world) say “…In the case of video, we believe that as one of the more important engagement objects, Google has actually started to build it into the algorithm. To us, that means if your website has engagement objects on it, video or mp3… it is going to be received better by the algorithm and your site will actually have an opportunity to rank higher.”

If you have a Flixity video and you don’t know how to add your video to your site, don’t worry – Flixity now offer a video embedding service at a very reasonable rate:
– £60 + vat to add your video to one page of your site.
– £15 +vat for every additional page.

Just instruct us exactly where on your page you would like it and we will re-size and fit it so that it looks fantastic. It’s that easy! Once it is added you will see the results in your site’s analytics and your video’s statistics!