
Foursquare enriches consumer experiences and informs business decisions through a deep understanding of location intelligence. Every month, 50 million+ people use the Foursquare City Guide app, Foursquare Swarm check-in app and websites to discover new places, explore the world and check in. Foursquare’s Places API powers location data for Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb and 100,000 other developers.
The Foursquare community, built on Google Groups, didn’t deliver the desired customer and Super User experience; they needed something different to generate the engagement necessary for long term success.
The launch of the first ever Foursquare branded community was simple and without issue.
Vanilla was the vendor of choice since it could be easily integrated with Foursquare’s existing ticket system and offered a wide range of tools that supported Super User engagement.
Foursquare saw a 15% boost in Super Users, who were able to rank up, execute permissions and communicate in their chosen language; today, the community has 45,000+ Super Users.
Victoria Ugarte, the Product Manager at Foursquare, knew that they needed to do something different to stand out. As Victoria says, “we wanted to avoid being seen as a soulless monolith as we grew.” She continues, “we wanted to bring a human face to the brand, we wanted transparency [and] all of this was possible [with an online community.]”
Victoria also knew that they needed a better way to communicate with their Super Users, since Google Groups didn’t function as the strategic and long term plan they were looking for, especially with the spike in competition. Super Users had been a key component of the Foursquare community from the beginning; there were a number of community members who were contributing about 8x the amount of a regular user. Victoria knew that they needed to do something to show these members their appreciation and recognition. She wanted to create a Super User experience. After all, it was the Super Users who they had to thank for making Foursquare the most trusted, independent technology platform upon which more than 150,000 brands and developers have built industry-leading products and services.
And so, Victoria knew that Foursquare needed a branded online community to create the customer experience, Super User recognition and the true sense of community that they were looking for.
Launching their first ever branded online community forum was an exciting time for Victoria, Lizzy and the entire Foursquare team. They knew that this would be the beginning of a lasting and successful Super User strategy. Ultimately, the launch went seamlessly and it didn’t take long for it to be up, running and successful.
Transparency and communication were key Foursquare values that helped push them towards implementing an online community. They wanted to have a dedicated space for their valued Super Users that would set them apart from their competition and recognize and reward member contributions. Their decision to procure a Vanilla community was well received by their customers and Super Users, who have substantially increased in numbers. Will implementing a Vanilla community pay off big time for you as well? Find out—hit us up, we’d love to see if we’d be a good fit!