When it comes to attracting clients, street charcoal boards with menu specials just don’t cut it anymore.
To keep up, cafes and restaurants must interact with customers using new technologies. And in Kyiv, they do well.
One of the tools employed by cafes and restaurants is Foursquare, a location-based social network gaining popularity in Ukraine. They offer customers discounts or free beverages, known as Foursquare specials. That way, customers are rewarded for a couple of clicks on their smartphones to “check in” at a venue on Foursquare, while the cafe, in turn, moves up the Foursquare list of popular places.
Half of Ukrainian Foursquare users live in Kyiv, a client base of some 28,000 active people who visit all kinds of venues, check in them and sometimes look for tips on where to have cheap lunch or beers on Saturday night. To reach customers, restaurants open Foursquare pages.
“Being represented on Foursquare is a matter of image for a restaurant now,” says Maksym Paraska, online projects manager for the Kozyrna Karta chain.
According to Paraska, 10 of the chain’s Kyiv restaurants offer specials for Foursquare activity.
Often a first check-in made by a Foursquare user will be specially rewarded, but others go further, offering free drinks or food for every third check-in. The most frequent visitor, or the “mayor” of a venue, in Foursquare terminology, can get even better deals, including up to 50 percent discounts.
Tarelka cafe, opened in September 2011, has aptly played the Foursquare game from the get go, changing its offers every couple of months to keep customer interest.
“At first we offered specials for each check-in, but then we saw it was actually a waste, because some people would come in every day, check in Foursquare and get free stuff. So now we only reward a customer on his first check-in,” says Elena Nikitina, administrator of Tarelka.
Now Tarelka offers a cup of herbal tea for the first check-in, and gives away about 15 teas every week. At a minimal expense, it gets Tarelka good recommendations.
Recommendations are featured in “tips,” short messages users post in Foursquare about venues. In tips, they put photos of the meals they’ve ordered, share Wi-Fi passwords and mention that they’ve just had a Foursquare special.
“Now Foursquare is not the best way to attract new customers, since there are not many people using smartphones yet,” says Paraska of Kozyrna Karta. “But soon it will become more important. In the last six months the number of check-ins in our restaurants grew twice.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
