As location based check-in services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places attempts to make a bigger dent in the online market they may want to rethink how they target their adult demographic. That’s because adults in a recent study revealed that only 5% of older users take advantage of location based services and everything they offer.

Surveying 37,000 people the Forrester Group found that only 2% of adult users take advantage of location based services (LBS) at least once or more per week, while 1% of users claim to use the service once a month and 2% of users say they use the service but less than one time per month.

The heart of the issue appears to be that many adults don’t even realize that location based services exist, for example 70% of respondents said they didn’t even realize that location based check-in programs exist. That 70% statistics is however a vast improvement over the 84% of adult users who were unfamiliar with location based services in 2010.

Location based services also appear not to resonate with a subset of adults with 10% saying they have seen the programs used but have chosen not to use them and the remaining 14% say they have heard of the program but have never seen them actually used by anyone.  [Read more…]