A few days ago the IAB Spain released to the press a report about the users of the “much talked about social network”, Foursquare in Spain.

Although the current usage of the network is more than disappointing, we observed some information that offers an incentive to those who believe that location based marketing is here to stay.

The most disappointing information is that only 4% of Spanish people who responded to the survey have heard about Foursquare. In our opinion, this is evidence in relation to the stage in which Spanish social networks users are at. While in the US, core social media users embrace every trend with high speed and enthusiasm, given companies incentives to consider social networks such as Foursquare for their social media marketing mix, in Spain users still need to figure out the wide range of benefits that social networks could offer.

Foursquare Spanish users are generally satisfied with the site although they don’t find the uses of it as really relevant for them. Users in NY, the city where most Foursquare users are located, are really excited about the network, so either Spanish users don’t feel the need to share their locations with their network or don’t need to know tips about cool locations around their city. Another factor that doesn’t push them towards the sharing of their location could also be the fact that in Spain, the wireless connection isn’t available for free in so many places. The cost of internet connection is also high, and the level of smart phones penetration rate is under the average of the US market.

The information displayed isn’t positive also if we consider the number of people who answered about how willing they would be to recommend this network to friends. Considering the fact that these types of social network benefit a lot from the power of word-of-mouth marketing, and users are more likely to log in if they know they will have friends with whom to communicate.

From the opinions of the people with whom we’ve discussed the subject, there seems to be another problem also: privacy. The study also reveals that users are not so sure about how secure it is to share your location with a circle of friends. Facebook fought with the same problem of privacy, after investigators discovered that thieves used information from Facebook to plan robberies. We could expect Foursquare to develop a method to fight these issues, as Facebook did by adding more privacy settings and making the website more secure.

Our opinion

We’ve detailed in a previous article our opinion on social networks based on location, and the fact that they are here to stay. Taking into account that we are based in Barcelona, we try to keep in touch with the latest developments of the local market. If we would point to a reason why the study revealed the data described in the report, we would say that the market still needs to grow. It is obvious that the Spanish market still needs some time before the social media users from here will start to use it in the same way as those from the U.S.  Social media in Spain still needs to mature more, and with the passing of the time we are positive that the opinions and functions that Spanish users attribute to social media will develop in a positive and wide direction.

As far as we see it, we are pretty anxious to see the same study done in a one year period.

The complete presentation can be downloaded here.