Earlier this month, we offered tips on how to use social media to reward your customers. One of the tips given was to leverage geo-location services like Foursquare which enables you to reward your mobile customers with special deals and discounts when they check in to your venue using the Foursquare service.

Last week, the geo-location service announced that businesses can now "claim" their venues on Foursquare, making it easier to offer venue promotions and reward customer loyalty based on Foursquare data usage. With the business dashboard, the service also enables businesses to get real-time insight on their Foursquare traction.

As Mashable.com reports,

"Data [made available from the Foursquare business dashboard] includes total checkins, unique visitors, male-to-female ratio, social media-sharing (i.e. showing how many users are sending their checkins to Twitter), top visitors and checkin time breakdown. Users can opt-out of sharing their checkin data via settings section of the website."

Once business owners claim their venue on Foursquare they can create their first special and then start tracking ROI using the business analytics tool. Foursquare manually verifies the validity of the business ownership claim, and while they don't give specifics on how long it takes to complete the verification, you can assume it won't take long since they want businesses to get up and running quickly.

There are all kinds of specials that businesses can track data on, including:

• Mayor Specials: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue. ex: "Foursquare has deemed you the Mayor? Enjoy a free order of french fries!"
• Check-in Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times. ex: "Foursquare says you've been here 10 times? That's a free drink for you!"
• Frequency-based Specials: are unlocked every X check-ins. ex: "Foursquare users get 20% off any entree every 5th check-in!"
• Wildcard Specials: always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the Special. ex: "Show us your foursquare Swarm badge and get a free drink!"

The service is free which is a great motivator for businesses to begin claiming their venues, and Foursquare even offers stickers and window clings that businesses can use to promote that they are a Foursquare business.

Check out our previous posts on Foursquare, location-based services and how its relevancy to businesses offers potential for driving cross channel traffic.