Foursquare in Southeast Asia: Statistics, Culture and Marketing

Foursquare is often associated with U.S users. But in actual fact, Foursquare is huge in Southeast Asia too. It was only highlighted thanks to a report by Oliver Woods, embedded below. Here’s a quick run down of Foursquare in Southeast Asia:

• Indonesia has 312,000 Foursquare users and also a Badge Mafia to “reward” users who would do anything to get badges on the location-based social network.
• Malaysian budget airline, Firefly, has more than 4,000 people following its Foursquare page. Malaysia has 136,000 Foursquare users.
• Singapore has 48,000 users and has a dedicated Foursquare user community who worked together to organize Foursquare Day 2011. In Twestival 2010, Singaporeans collaborated to earn the Swarm Badge as a team.
• In Thailand, a bank created an exclusive debit card just for Foursquare fans. Thailand has 152,000 Foursquare users. Any geek would want to have one. Picture, courtesy of visible banking.

Back to reality

Foursquare is hot in Southeast Asia, but it isn’t attractive enough to be used as a marketing platform for most businesses. It only has 6 million users as of January 2011. Foursquare pales in comparison with Facebook, which has a far larger user base and also its own check-in service. It’s a no-brainer conclusion, taking Singapore as reference, which would you choose: Foursquare’s 48,000 users or Facebook’s 2.4 million users? (Singapore has a total population of 5 million)

Nonetheless, adopting Foursquare has its advantages. It helps brand target early adopters who are usually influential in their social networks. Getting a head start on a possibly next-big-thing could reap tremendous benefits in the future. It’s the same analogy for those who started early on Twitter usually get more followers and attention compared to late entrants. However, Twitter enjoyed tremendous growth in its early days which isn’t experienced in Foursquare, yet.