90% of businesses would not pay to be on Foursquare. So what now?

Just saw an interesting bit over at Search Engine Land that might help Foursquare figure out exactly how to make money.

According to some research and polling, only 10% of businesses say that they’d pay to have their service on the location service.  Some other interesting figures:

Of that 10% –

• almost 60% have a total annual advertising budget of less than $2,500 (online and offline spending)
• more than 90% are also on Facebook
• almost 90% use Twitter
• more than 90% have a web site
• almost 80% have claimed their Google Place Page; almost 40% use Yahoo Local, and almost 20% use Bing Maps as marketing tools

So what does it mean?  If Foursquare is to search for profit, then the word needs to be spread more.  Foursquare also needs to find a way to market itself as a viable resource for traffic.

Though the majority of those polled say that they’re familiar with the service, they say that they are not certain whether it is helping their business or not.  However, it’s also worthy to note that, of those polled who say that they’re using Foursquare to promote, they’ve only been doing so for 1 month or less.

Foursquare, by its very nature, is a viral product.  However, it might not be as invasive or disruptive as it would like to be.  Though this isn’t a killer, it’s certainly something to figure out, moving forward.