foursquare: By the Numbers

Every week, we take one social platform and explore its numbers. Today we are looking at foursquare – which has been hanging around in the social world for a while now. Some people have written it off but it is hard to write off a platform with more than 45 million users and great rankings in the search world.

Let’s look at some of the numbers and then discuss where foursquare fits in the social media world.

foursquare’s Raw Numbers

foursquare was launched on March 11, 2009. Since then it has amassed a user base of more than 45 million users. These users have “checked-in” to local establishments more than 5 billion times and have left 40 million tips, or reviews. There are 60 million venues or establishments registered with the social network and 1.3 million foursquare business pages. Finally, the most liked page on is, by no surprise, Starbucks with 1.4 million likes.

Has Some Rough Competition

So these are so pretty crazy numbers but they are a lot less impressive than their principle competitors, Yelp and Facebook. Let’s start with Yelp. foursquare offers the ability for individuals to leave tips about specific restaurants. It offers businesses a page to keep information about their business. On the business pages, are links to menus, reviews, and ratings. foursquare has a great interface, one that I think is superior to Yelp, but Yelp has so many more users, businesses, and reviews. Despite a very rocky start and some controversy over purchased reviews, Yelp still dominates in this space.

foursquare really pioneered the concept of checking-in to a specific location. It was the functionality that they brought to the social world. However, in late 2010, Facebook launched the same “check-in” functionality to their local places. There was no way foursquare could compete with Facebook’s numbers. Facebook later started reviews and ratings. Despite this fierce competition, foursquare has survived and has maintained a network of loyal users. In addition foursquare has flourished with these features and they never seemed to bite on Facebook.

foursquare’s Place in the Social Media World

foursquare is still around and still going strong. I think for many businesses, energy should be spent on managing more important social media platforms. However, if you have a venue or restaurant, you cannot ignore foursquare. Make sure you have a page and that the page is updated. This will help you get in front of those people who are still using foursquare and it will help get more play on search.