Congratulations on claiming your business on Foursquare! You now have access to all of our business tools which you can use for free advertising! 

From your merchant dashboard, you can: 

1. Measure how many people come to your business and check in on Foursquare (everyday, in total, by gender, and other great analytics).

2. Reward customers for coming to your business with specials. Its a great way to increase foot traffic and promote loyalty among your customers.

3. Give you a communication channel to message your customers. We call these local updates. They're news about an upcoming event, new product, or even notice that the shop will be closed due to bad weather. We want to give businesses a way to better engage with folks we already know are their customers.

Accessing the tools:

To access your business tools, you need to "act as" your business listing on Foursquare. 

Navigate to the top right where your name is displayed and hover over it, this will let you switch accounts to start using Foursquare as your business.

When acting as your business, you can see the updated merchant options on the top of your screen. These include...

Local Updates:

Local Updates enable you to send messages from your stores to your customers. They receive these messages in their feeds of friend activity as well as consume your Updates on your venue pages. Its a great way to promote your business (like a virtual chalkboard)!

All you need to send an update is some text, or a photo, and what location(s) should be sending them! 

Posting Specials:

Specials are a great way to reward users for checking in and coming to your business. There are 7 different types and they can either drive new business or reward loyal customers. Its en entirely self-service platform and you can create a special in under 2 minutes!

Dashboard Stats:

You have access to some great data on your location's Foursquare traffic. This data is available in real-time in a clean visual dashboard. You also have you the option to download a .csv file if you want to dig into the raw numbers.

Click around and see how your business is doing!

If you want to get those numbers up, start running Updates and Specials!

Tools:

You have full control to edit all of your locations or just one of them. Clicking on the Tools page will give you access to do things like..

*Edit ALL of your venue's information (like adding twitter, descriptions, websites to all)

*Edit a SINGLE venue's info (like address, name, request merges, etc)

*Adding extra users as managers of ALL venues or just ONE. Toggle with the venue selector at the top of the screen.