I recently ran into this great article on Hubspot that had some tips on how to set up a great Foursquare promotion: “7 Best Practices for a Successful Mobile Check-In Campaign”.

The author had some great ideas that are not only good for your mobile check-in campaign or promotion but just good marketing in general.

Things that stood out to me:

• Seed the check-in promotion with incentives to get the ‘ball rollin’ – give an incentive to the ‘first 10’ entries.
• Make a substantial offer – “$5 off” sometimes just doesn’t get people enthused!
• Get your business workflow in place before you launch – make sure you have your back-end business processes set up and in place before you launch the promotion. Do all the relevant employees know how the campaign works and how to process the promotion redemptions?