Give me 3 minutes – and I’ll give you 3 insights about Runkeeper

Don’t you just love to run outside, catch some fresh air and unwind your brain? Running is a great exercise for almost anyone.

Since a couple of weeks I have been using a tool which makes it even more fun. It’s an iPhone application called Runkeeper which tracks your running efforts.

Now what’s so special about that you might ask?

It’s brilliant. Not just because it is good software but even more because it allows you – the runner – to share your run with your friends. Next to that, the team behind Runkeeper is doing an excellent job in marketing their product, using social media and their fans to get more people to use it.

Any brand can learn from Runkeeper’s online approach. Why? I’ll explain below…  

You become the publisher

After you completed your run, the application allows you to share it with your friends on twitter and facebook. It sends out a short message that will tell them you just completed your run, a link to your personal page on runkeeper.com that includes a map, your trail and your statistics. It also includes the @runkeeper twitter account and #runkeeper hashtag.

Social Proof

Think about it…when you are running you know that your friends will actually see your results when you complete it. That is definitely a motivator. Next, they see you use the application and get a direct link to the runkeeper website. Runkeeper uses ‘social proof’ for marketing their product. If you use it, it is almost a ‘silent recommendation’ to your friends, isn’t it?

Using the hastag #runkeeper, you can easily find other people that like to run and use the application. I even got recommendations from someone on where to run next. Awesome experience I must say. 

Great niche

It is estimated that Apple will sell 45 million iPhone units by the end of 2009. That’s a lot of potential customers for any iPhone application. Runkeeper focuses on a great niche; people that run or bike (it also has a mode for biking). By providing a free version and a pro version, they make it very easy to get to know the product and switch to the pro version once you have sampled the application. The pro version allows you to listen to your stats in real-time during your activity and it comes with training workouts that can be completed by voice guidance.

Overall a great piece of software and I definitely recommend you take a look at it. What’s even more interesting is to take a close look at their online approach.

Can you reuse any of it in your business?