Slow Traffic in the Check-in Lane
Location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla have been lauded by marketers for their capacity to know where a mobile user is and how often he or she returns, and to serve up special offers or rewards to encourage visits and other behavior.
But a new study from the Pew Research Center has found that only 12% of U.S. smartphone owners use their devices to tell their social graph where they are and what they're doing. Compared to the percentages who do other things on their smartphones, such as accessing social media (59%) or getting directions or recommendations specific to their locations (55%), that's pretty small.
The percentage rises somewhat among those smartphone owners 18-29, but even among that group, only 15% of users check in on these geosocial platforms.
Bad news, Twitter. On average, only 15% of smartphone owners used them to post messages to the real-time service.
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