As the demand for social media continues to grow, Grand Valley State University is implementing one more social networking site: FourSquare.

FourSquare allows people to share their locations with friends. Along with sharing their current location, deals sometimes appear when a person checks into certain locations.

Dave Poortvliet, a web manager for Institutional Marketing, said GVSU decided to implement FourSquare because of the university’s success with other social media.

“We had really good success in connecting with students through other social media like Twitter and Facebook, and location-based services like Foursquare just seemed like the next logical step,” he said. “We also saw a lot of faculty, staff and students were starting to use FourSquare.”

According to a FourSquare press release, the GVSU FourSquare page will help students, alumni, faculty, staff and visitors share information about classes, activities and other campus events.

Like Facebook and Twitter, Foursquare has an online site and a mobile app, available for the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm and Ovi.

Foursquare has a badge system for people who actively use the app. If the user checks in to a place enough times, the user can become the mayor of the location.

Currently, hundreds of buildings show up on Foursquare at GVSU. Poortvliet said a person can check into specific rooms or places inside a building as well.

“So you can not only check into the building, but check into the exact restaurant or even room,” he said.

Poortvliet is working with Campus Dining to bring specials and savings to students who check into restaurants around campus. Molly Carmer, associate marketing manager for Campus Dining, said the number of restaurants on campus that will use Foursquare will depend on the number of students that will use the service.

“If it takes off and we get a lot of participants out there, I mean we will definitely continue to use it,” she said. “If it is something where we don’t really get any participation with it, then you know we’ll keep looking for more popular avenues to communicate with the students.”

There are week-long happy hour promotions planned for Foursquare users that check in at Fuel, River Landing, Lobby Shop, Wire and Plaza Caf?©. The promotion will run from 2 to 4 p.m. A similar promotion for C3 Express shops will run from 6 to 8 p.m.

Carmer said that sites like Foursquare are a good way to communicate with students.

“One thing that’s nice about not only Foursquare but social media as a whole is it gives us the opportunity to very quickly communicate to our audience what things that we’re doing, so that’s a really good avenue for us,” she said

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