Create a page for your brand on Foursquare

Just this week the geeks at Foursquare rolled out a self serve model for brands and businesses to create their own page on the highly popular geo-location site. You can now build a page for your company and get “followed,” share interesting tips and interact with your fans.

Until this week, the option for creating a page for your business took weeks. I should know, I had placed my request in early June.

Before the self service option there were more than 3,000 business and brand pages, most of them well known companies like Sports Authority, The Gap, Red Bull, hotels, travel spots, colleges and universities and techie brands that wanted to be on the cusp of something new and innovative.

Foursquare and their business development team were rolling more than 70 a week for the past year and a half. Now with this option anybody can add a page of their own and we are sure to see a huge influx of early adopters to this new brand of media.

Tips

The way for a company to interact with their followers is through “tips.” These tips should be relevant to both you and your brand and the locale. On our new Foursquare page for Team Ineka we have shared information on the location of the start of the Iditarod and more.

This relationship market is key to our brand at Team Ineka and we have hopes that we can share interesting tips and advice on the sport of dog sledding and mushing.

How to Create a Foursquare Page

So you’ve decided you’re interested? Luckily, the process is now quite simple. Just follow these steps:

Sign in to Foursquare (or, if necessary, create an account).
Go to the Page Creation landing page. Click “Create a Page.” This will prompt you to sign in via Twitter if you haven’t done so already.
You’ll see a form with information that’s been imported from Twitter. Your company name, website, and contact information will all be pulled. Review it for accuracy.
Fill out the additional items, paying special note to the “Page Description” and “Banner Image.” They’re both necessary steps to appearing in the Page Gallery.
Hit the confirmation button on the bottom of the screen to finalize the page.
Find five locations and leave tips.

There is one trick that will take a bit of graphics know how. You must create a banner for your page that is exactly 860×130 pixels with a translucent background and must include the word “Foursquare” somewhere in the banner.

Creating this banner is the hardest part of the process and will require you to have Photoshop or some other graphics type program. I hired a graphic design friend of mine and he whipped up my banner in just a couple hours.

Once you are finished you can be qualified for the Page Gallery. I ran through the initial steps for my own account (though it’s admittedly not well optimized). This page took me 10 minutes, tips included.