I was in Brisbane for a few days last week with my family, and not having spent a lot of time in that city, I don’t necessarily know all the good places to go and things to do. Many times I pulled out my iPhone and fired up the Foursquare app to see what was around.

Foursquare is one of a number of location aware apps that knows where you are and tells you what’s in your immediate location. You can explore what’s around by category, for example restaurants. To narrow down the results, I searched for Indian – there were several but they were on the other side of town – too far to walk.

The I searched for the most popular restaurants. With each restaurant, you can see tips that have been left by other people who have been there. We read the tips left by the top restaurant and there were 22 rave reviews. So that’s where we went, and it really was a great dining experience (the restaurant was Vapiano).

On Foursquare, once you get to a place, you can ‘check in’, and have the option of notifying your friends, and even posting your location to your Facebook and Twitter account.

There is a marketing component to all this that businesses can take advantage of. A business can offer deals to those who check in, which in turn promotes the business to the customers online friend network, which can be substantial.

Also, when in an area that you are unfamiliar with, you can not only see what’s around, but also see what deals are being offered to Foursquare users. The place offering the best deal might just get your business.

Foursquare is a great tool, but it may well be left behind by the newly launched Facebook Places, which is a similar concept, but with 10 million Australians already using Facebook, they have a big head start.

Location based social networking services – they really are the next big thing.

It’s a good idea to write regular articles, or blog, on your website if you want to increase traffic (and who doesn’t!).

If you do this, you can automatically send notification to your Facebook , Twitter and other social media accounts.

This way, everything you write gets sent out to your network, and links back to your website.

There are a number of ways to set up a system like this, for example, you can add the RSS feed from your blog to third party website Twitterfeed, which will then post updates to your Twitter account.

As more people spend more time in social networks, that is where you should be sending your content.

If you’re wondering whether you should be using Twitter, here are 5 reasons why you should:

1. Follow trends – Keep track of what’s being discussed based on keywords
2. Make announcements – Use Twitter as part of your media strategy
3. Stay informed – Twitter has become the place where breaking news breaks first
4. Network – ‘Meet’ new people with similar interests and have (short) conversations
5. Generate website traffic – Always link back to your website when making an announcement

In business today, the internet must be a part of your strategy. Where do you start?

First, get your website in order. Your website is the cornerstone of your internet strategy, it’s the place that you want people to go to, and it should be designed to make it easy for people to find, and easy for them to achieve their (your) goals.

You want people to go to your website because that’s where your message is, and that’s where you educate people about your products and services and prompt them into action, whether it be making a purchase or enquiry, or just signing up for your email newsletter, allowing you to market to them later.

You want people to end up at your website, but they won’t necessarily start there. They may start at Google, or an online business directory. The more places your presence can be found on the internet, the easier it will be to find, or stumble across, your business.

Consider a twitter account. Twitter allows you to ‘tweet’ about what your business is doing; new products, announcements etc., and link back to your website. People will find your tweets and click through to your website to read more.

Are you passionate and knowledgeable enough about your business that you can write about it? On the internet, information is gold. Start a blog and write about things that your business does. Write regularly. People will find what you are writing about when they search or browse the internet.