Local Businesses Are Excited About Foursquare Ads

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Foursquare has opened its advertising platform to all small businesses (approximately 1.5 million across the country use the check-in service).

Advertisers will be able create their own promotions from an ads dashboard. Targeting users who are near a local store will make the ads particularly intriguing to brands with brick-and-mortar shops.

Brands that participated in the pilot program seem quite pleased with Foursquare ads thus far. "The major difference with Foursquare [compared to Facebook, Twitter, and Google] is that it allows you to track how much foot traffic your ads are driving in a way nobody else can," said David Feit, marketing director at Sky Room, a luxurious rooftop bar in NYC. (Foursquare)

In Other News …

According to a study from Kaplan, "fewer than 1 in 3 admissions officers say they check students' social media posting or Google them when evaluating applications." (SFGate)

Marketers who use Twitter's advertising products can now schedule tweets (whether organic or promoted) up to a year in advance. (Twitter Blog)

Once the MoPub acquisition closes, Twitter plans to begin mining user data to help sell ads on other mobile apps or websites. In practice, Twitter is using its social graph to bolster the relevancy and value of MoPub's ad inventory - which is among the largest in mobile advertising. (TechCrunch)

Snapchat published a blog posting saying that it has turned over "about a dozen" Snaps (photos or videos that users share with friends) to law enforcement since May 2013. Snapchat says that this includes requests to preserve Snaps for a period of time. The disclaimer is informative for users who were under the impression that Snaps slipped under the watchful eye of law enforcement. (Snapchat)

GlobalWebIndex surveyed more than 40,000 Internet users to gauge how they interact with brands on social media. The fastest growing change in behavior is that more Internet users are "retweeting branded posts" and "uploading photos and videos to a brand's social media page." (GlobalWebIndex)