Foursquare is still making gains in users and check-ins, with the company reporting in December of last year that it had reached 45 million registered users and surpassed 5 billion check-ins. That’s up from January 2013, when Foursquare had 30 million registered users, a 50% gain in just under one year. (Foursquare did not say how many of those registered users are active each month.)
As you can see in the BI Intelligence chart below, Foursquare has been consistently adding users since 2009. But 45 million is still not a huge number when compared to a social network like LinkedIn, which had 259 million registered users at the end of the third quarter. Moreover, even as the number of check-ins is growing, their appeal to a broad number of mobile users is diminishing fast.
So, Foursquare has pivoted recently and is increasingly focused on harvesting location-based data, making the app a big data instrument. This means that while Foursquare may not have the greatest number of users, the information the app can harvest about them will be increasingly valuable.
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