Why To Keep Track on Location-Based Services

A great location is the best asset of traditional shops, always was and always will be. There’s much smaller chance that customers will just walk by when it’s at the Fifth Avenue in New York or at the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

But with the evolution of various location based services, well known Foursquare, Facebook Places and Shopkick; and new platforms such as Foodspotting and Xtify, it’s not only about “fifth avenues” anymore.

A fact is that not all users are willing to do the mobile check-in and share their location, but there are plenty of ways how to add a spark and motivate them – with vouchers, various special offers, discounts, collecting  “kickbucks” (Shopkick), and so on.

According to a recent data released by comScore, there’s a slight difference in the usage of location-based services in Europe and in the North-America. From 235,5 million European mobile subscribers (from UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain) only 5% users used location-used services on their phones (3 month average; Feb-Mar 2011).

In the same time period 7% of the U.S. mobile subscribers “checked-in” someplace, what counts for around 16,7 million users. And its not a surprise that this is a domain of the younger generation, see the comparing chart below.

And now back to the point – why it is important to keep track on location-based services? The answers are simple:

• there are more than 1 billion smartphones in use worldwide (and increasing);
• 600 million+ Facebook users, from which 1/3 use mobile to access it;
• 50% of 165 million twitter users tweet from mobile.

With such audience (and growing), increasing number of various services and sky-rocketing number of devices, it’s on the marketeers to maximize opportunities and take advantage of what is basically given to them.

Either through staggering campaigns, exclusive deals and promotions creating&encouraging brand awareness to set the trends both for early and later majority users.

Sources: edelmandigital.com, business2community.com, comscore.com, smarte-commerce.com