Foursquare is Turning into a Local Search Hub - Are you ready?!

Foursquare is known for its fun badges, mayors status and check-in specials. We've been covering this trendy app that was a fresh blend of social and local since it hit the market and have encouraged you to jump on board.

You could see that they were getting serious about going mainstream when they first released their social search engine in Feb 2012 and then when they were added to Bing's social side bar in Aug 2012.

Now, on October 15th, Foursquare officially announced the roll out of a desktop homepage that's designed to target people who are not yet members to the site. This change in their search features comes on the heels of the hiring of a former Google Sr. Executive, Andrew Hogue, about a year ago. His assignment when brought into the company was to improve the search algorithm and member experience on Foursquare's Desktop site as well as its popular mobile apps.

So, what does this all mean to you? Well, these updates translate into Foursquare becoming a hub for trusted reviews and business listings worldwide. Yelp is the king of this specific Internet nitch and Foursquare is ready to stand next to them with their huge wealth of verified and very active members posting constantly about local businesses everywhere.

This means that you need to be sure your business is listed and actively using Foursquare, as well as Yelp. If you've been following our advice then this is just confirmation that you're on the right track and don't need to do anything that you haven't already been doing.

However, if Foursquare hasn't been on your radar until now then you can use the following resources to get caught up because they are not only here to stay - they're looking for a fight and nothing pushes a company to succeed like some healthy competition!