I’ve been a keen Foursquare user pretty much since the start in 2009.  Like many, the idea of gaining badges and mayorships became very addictive but the novelty soon wore off and led to many people questioning the real benefits of the service.   There are only approximately 193,000 users in the U.K, significantly less, proportionately, than countries like the US which has over 10 million  users.  Having said all of that, Foursquare has had a busy 2012 and has shown some signs of ‘growing up’, not only as a service but as a company too. Read more »

Recently, Facebook announced the launch of “global pages”, a much-anticipated and welcome new way for brand pages to structure themselves.  They allow a centralised page to be used as an international hub, whilst also localising a user’s experience for the country they are in.

Previously, there were only two brand page options: either a single page that used geo-targeted posts aimed at specific audiences or, secondly, a country-specific page.  A single page using geo-targeted posts misses out on localising other parts of the page such as its cover photos, profile pictures and specific milestones that a local market may have. The country-specific pages suffer from a problem too.  Users often get confused about which page to search for and ‘like’, and will instead find the page that pops up first, ultimately missing out on the content published from the correct country’s page. Read more »