This ability to discover new places and spread the word about your favorite places makes Foursquare a natural marketing and promotion tool for food and entertainment venues that thrive on foot traffic.

Most small businesses I meet ask me some variation of the same question, “how do I use this to market my business?” Until now, the answer has really been only about advertising your “deals” and offering incentives to the “mayor” of your location. The person who checks in the most at a location eventually becomes the mayor, and a deal is an advertisement that is served to someone who checks in within a radius of the advertiser (think two-for-one or a 20% off).

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the new tools Foursquare is rolling out for small business marketing. They provide real interaction with your customers.

The article does a great job of exampling how businesses can use the tools to get new customers and increase the loyalty of their most frequent visitors, so I won’t go down that road.

Instead, I’ll make an observation about what Foursquare has the ability to turn into. Each time we show a client the power of Google Analytics, and the stats it provides them about who is visiting their website, how they’re finding it, and what they’re doing during the visit, their eyes get really big with possibility. I’ve even heard them speculate what it would be like to have this kind of data on their in-store traffic patterns.

Well, if you see what the Foursquare tools look like, you’ll see what I am getting at. You can have rich and powerful data on your in-store traffic just like Google Analytics gives you about your website traffic. And, just like we optimize websites based on traffic data, you can begin optimizing your menus, hours, specials, sales, ticket prices and staffing levels in new ways.

Check out Foursquare and the new small business marketing tools. Have fun inventing new ways to promote and optimize your business.