August 3rd, 2011

Foursquare business pages are no longer limited to large brands with the money and clout to buy Foursquare’s limited and in-demand dev resources. Business pages are now self-serve, Foursquare announced Tuesday.

For the past 18 months, Foursquare has created about 3,000 business pages in-house, relying on its developers and designers and coordinating with brand creative teams along the way.

It was a time-consuming, unsustainable and restricting growth model that limited the amount of businesses that could be “followed” on Foursquare. As a result, the location-based service tended to work with big names, such as Louis Vuitton, Zagat, The New York Times, the History Channel, Brooklyn Museum and the city of Chicago.

Now, any business can create a free Foursquare business page, enabling it to customize a branded page where fans can “follow” the brand and unlock its tips.

Foursquare’s new self-serve model for brand pages will be particularly beneficial to small businesses, who have gained from managing their venues on Foursquare, but have not had the ability to interact with users by leaving Foursquare tips.

The biggest improvement to the business page experience is the ability to have entire teams of people manage the same page. Foursquare introduced a new tool to enable brands to add multiple page “managers” to a page’s account.

Before getting started, brands should read through Foursquare’s FAQ on business pages to get an idea of what they’ll need to get started and maintain the page.