Restaurant Social Media
Social Media - how do you approach it?
Over the last few months I've been doing lots of research about Social Media and how to apply it to the Café I work.
Hospitality has great opportunities to expand its source of customers and engage them in a more personal level. It's no longer only about the customer you get at the dinning table but those you can attract by the word of mouth as well. Referral marketing is amazing! So why don't take advantage of what's already out there and do something with it?
But how do you apply said knowledge and make something with it. I've been using Facebook & Twitter for years now. Which means that when the time came to launch the Café's Facebook Fan Page everyone turned to me. I have the skills and most importantly I enjoy being online. That's my internal geek talking here. I'm in the zone! I honestly love it.
Now there's a lot of question of what to do first. Should you open a business profile or a fan page? What about objectives & strategies? There's too much to read about the subject. Social media can be daunting once you start the research. I'm trying to expand my knowledge and I've invested hours of my spare time in it. Why? Because I see a brilliant future ahead.
Upon my research I've come across what we call a Social Media Manager. Its job description pretty much means what I've been trying to do for the past month at work. There's a high demand of this skills I'm mentioning. And interestingly enough there are not enough people making it happen. Businesses need someone's input on how to approach Social Media. Which tools to use? What strategies will best apply to them? The questions can go on and on for pages.
I've found Mashable.com to be a great source of answers & Fohboh.com concerning the hospitality industry, which is why I'm posting this here. The answers are out there and the key is to know where to find them.
The main reason for posting this is to ask: what do you think about the subject? Are you using Social Media for your business? Have you been able to measure your ROI already? Any recommendation on what I should and shouldn't do? I'm open for ideas here. And I'm looking forward to some feedback.
Hospitality has great opportunities to expand its source of customers and engage them in a more personal level. It's no longer only about the customer you get at the dinning table but those you can attract by the word of mouth as well. Referral marketing is amazing! So why don't take advantage of what's already out there and do something with it?
But how do you apply said knowledge and make something with it. I've been using Facebook & Twitter for years now. Which means that when the time came to launch the Café's Facebook Fan Page everyone turned to me. I have the skills and most importantly I enjoy being online. That's my internal geek talking here. I'm in the zone! I honestly love it.
Now there's a lot of question of what to do first. Should you open a business profile or a fan page? What about objectives & strategies? There's too much to read about the subject. Social media can be daunting once you start the research. I'm trying to expand my knowledge and I've invested hours of my spare time in it. Why? Because I see a brilliant future ahead.
Upon my research I've come across what we call a Social Media Manager. Its job description pretty much means what I've been trying to do for the past month at work. There's a high demand of this skills I'm mentioning. And interestingly enough there are not enough people making it happen. Businesses need someone's input on how to approach Social Media. Which tools to use? What strategies will best apply to them? The questions can go on and on for pages.
I've found Mashable.com to be a great source of answers & Fohboh.com concerning the hospitality industry, which is why I'm posting this here. The answers are out there and the key is to know where to find them.
The main reason for posting this is to ask: what do you think about the subject? Are you using Social Media for your business? Have you been able to measure your ROI already? Any recommendation on what I should and shouldn't do? I'm open for ideas here. And I'm looking forward to some feedback.
Thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Andy.
Tags: cafe, media, restaurant, social
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Emerald Reilly on -
Hi Andy, I too am doing Social Media marketing for restaurants. There's a few things I can recommend for you to get started. Mashable is a great social media blog, there's also social media today, social media examiner a ton others. I would open a FB fan page & a Twitter account for your cafe. By using tools designed for Twitter, like TweetDeck, you can search for chatter about your cafe online and related topics to you business. I would also find other restaurants that are excelling at social media and mimic them. Some that I believe are doing it right are: @konagrill @pacificcatch @paccatchCOO @yardhouse. You should also get your staff involved on these channels as well.
But the number one thing you need to do is develop a strategy. You need to think about WHAT your business objectives are. Do you want to build buzz about a new location? Build relationships with existing customers? Tell people about new menu items? Then you also need to take into consideration WHO your audience is and where they are online. While most of the online chatter about restaurants are on Twitter and FB they are not the only tools out there, there are photo sharing sites like Flickr or mini blog sites like Posterous.
Social Media is just another TOOL for your marketing message, so treat your interactions with your guest just as you would in real life. Thank them for visiting, ask them what they liked or didn't and say sorry if something goes wrong. I do not personally believe that ROI is something that can be directly measured from most social media campaigns, but the engagement and relationships you build with your guest can be. Social media is a powerful tool that give you real time feedback and your business will be better for it.
Good luck!
Emerald
@FohBohGem
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Permalink Reply by Andrea Graziano Vidal on -
Hi Emerald! Thanks for the reply!
I'll definitely look into those restaurants that are already taking advantage of social media. The objectives and the strategies are on our top things to decide over the next few weeks. Hopefully we'll have everything up and running in no time. The FB page is functioning already as a matter of fact. I've been trying to keep it fresh and updated but I need the strategies to be defined better in order for me to do so. I know it depends on the type of restaurant but which strategies do you think are most useful? Any recommendations? I have a lot of ideas but sometimes it's good to have another opinion.
Cheers,
Andy.
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Permalink Reply by Joel Lazeski on -
Andrea, thanks for your discussion post and it sounds like your off on the right foot. I have been working on developing stratagies for clients of mine that are attempting to delve into social media. Emerald is definitely correct in deciding on the strategy for your campaign. One thing that you could use to assist in trying to define your strategy is to have a one or two hour focus group with the management and staff. Get a flip chart out and decide what is important for the business. Keep your strategy in line with your current marketing materials unless you plan on rewriting your brand all together.
As far as measuring your social campaign there are tools available to you and most of them are useful but this requires a lot of time and effort to learn about. My suggestion is to make your campaigning directly measurable some of the time. Ex. Send out a tweet to ask for your customers to come down and ask for a certain free experimental coffee ( maybe a Vidalatte or something) and if they do so then provide an incentive. Put a time frame on this so that customers have to take advantage of it between 12-4 and if they miss it then its over. This way you can count how many users are seeing your tweets. This will create a buzz around your business and make it fun as well and your customers will see real value in your posts. They won't feel spammed like so many new social media campaigners can do.
I haven't used this tactic yet myself but I have been hearing about it more often lately as foursquare and facebook are making these location service tools fairly effective. This is just one cool idea I have recently heard about and am looking forward to testing soon!
Good Luck and Have Fun!
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Permalink Reply by Emerald Reilly on
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Andy,
One strategy that is very important to our social media beliefs here at FohBoh regardless of the restaurant, is not to just PUSH your messages out but to use PULL messaging as well. We try to adhere to the 40% push/60 % pull ratio. You want to find some topics that are related to your business indirectly that you can post about and still stick to the brand's overall message. For example, for one of my clients that is a brewery/sports pub I post about beer trivia, articles on home brewing, I ask them who their favorite sports teams are, who they want to win the game, etc. That way we are having conversations with our fans/followers but we're not talking about our business. Feedback questions are great for Facebook too. Everyone wants to give their opinions.
Emerald
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