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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

As a native speaker of en-US, I think this question may be the first time I've seen or heard 'footfalls'. 'Footsteps' is standard -- for the act, the sound, or the marks.

It would work better as a product/service name -- then your efforts can fill in the details; its lack of a literal meaning to many Americans could even be a benefit. But as a tagline, it obscures rather than clarifies.

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Thanks! The fact that this is the first time you've heard the word conveys a lot. We're looking at amending the tagline at this time. Would you know if there's a one word equivalent to footfalls? I don;t think footsteps would do it.

From web searches, it seems there are two senses to the word 'footfalls': the sound of footsteps, and the amount of foot traffic past a retail location.

And those are the most common wordings in en-US: 'footsteps' is also the sound, and 'foot traffic' is the common term for the quantity of people walking by a storefront.

Appreciate the inputs. I guess "Social foot traffic for your Local Business",while correct, doesn't quite pack a punch. Perhaps we'll just go with "Social traffic for your Local Business". Anyway, I'm relooking the headline too - so hopefully we'll change the copy to something much more clear.

Happy to help. While I can say 'footfalls' is an unfamiliar word for a US reader, it might still have some curiosity-generating value for its novelty -- as long as you aren't expecting it to have explanatory value alone. (I might have thought it was a brandable word you made up, to describe some unique feature/metric of your product, had the context of your question not made clear it was a real word from elsewhere.)

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