Foursquare Site goes Down - Members Flock to Twitter

Around 7am eastern time on January 24th, Foursquare check-in enthusiasts were MIA while technical difficulties caused the site to go down for several hours. Even if you don't have a Foursquare account, you may have read some of the tweets being sent out by people voicing their concerns; in fact, "foursquaredown" was a trending topic on the micro-blogging site during the outage.

Twitter has become the new "customer support" line when a site has issues like this. The only difference between Twitter and an old fashioned phone call: anyone can read the conversation. The last thing you want to do is avoid the problem. This is when your social media team need to be on their A-Game by responding to questions/complaints and keeping people updated with the latest news. 

Foursquare's support account reacted well by immediately acknowledging the problem and responding to people's tweets; however, I do think they could have done a better job by making responses and updates more personal. Every response they gave on Twitter was the same.

The canned response approach may work, but if you're already engaging with people, why not take time to tailor your response to the person's tweet? After a while, people will notice that you are being vague and impersonal. 

Even the updates on their support site were generalized, giving no indication as to whether or not previous check-ins might be salvaged. 

Of course, as indicated in the above screenshot, around 11:45 the site was back up and members were on their way to earning more check-in badges. The topic "foursquaredown" stopped trending on Twitter almost immediately after the site came back, and the Foursquare support account tweeted, "All systems are back to normal. Resume your check-ins. Thanks for being patient!!"

What are your thoughts on how Foursquare handled the outage? Do you have any best practice tips for when a website goes down? Let us know in the comments below. 

Photo Credit: Nan Palmero