Foursquare’s promoted updates, the company’s ad product in its trial phase with retailers, is showing signs of early success, according to CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley. Crowley said a “high percentage” of users shown these promotions while looking for places or recommendations via Foursquare’s Explore search engine end up visiting the stores being promoted. “As Foursquare has learned to harvest more and more data and turn it into tailored recommendations, it’s become more of a personalized mobile local search engine for its 25 million users.” The company is able to leverage what it knows about a user’s location and tastes, the time of day, and the user’s friends’ tastes to deliver results that outdo those from traditional search engines. This kind of content could divert spending that goes to the less relevant content on Facebook and Twitter. (GigaOM)
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