Social Media Users Eat Too!

Social Media: A Serious Marketing Tool for Restaurants
It’s a common question: “Where should we go for dinner tonight?” and one that was once just asking a significant other or perhaps a friend. What a friend has to say about a restaurant can steer us to or from an establishment, depending on what’s said. Social media has gladly taken this effect and amplified it to another level. An assortment of social media platforms are now utilized for marketing, creating brand awareness, reputation monitoring, and consumer engagement. Social media websites such as forums, blogs, review sites, Twitter, and so forth are now used to rate different restaurants and the trend has caught on. One way to do this is with Google Alerts. With this restaurant owners can track any keyword and/or brand mentions of their company to examine the positive and negative talk that is being said online their business.

Car insurance companies have noticed this and taken advantage of it, but the restaurant industry seemed to be a bit late to the party. That is most certainly changing though.
In a Restaurant.org survey “more than eight out of ten restaurant operators” stated their intention to use social media as a key tool in their marketing strategy. Over half of the operators surveyed stated that it was their intent to do so within the next two years. Nowadays, it takes much more for a restaurant to succeed, then just knowing how to prepare the perfect dish. It takes a great amount of creativity to market your brand and connect with your customer base. Restaurants are now able to develop social media platforms for marketing, brand monitoring, and beyond.

Some of the most popular mediums that restaurant operators and owners can utilize include: 

• Facebook
• Online review sites
• Twitter
• Blogging websites

Twitter is an effective way to engage with customers and to increase customer base. Using this social media platform gives restaurants the ability to announce new appetizers or the drink special of the day, promote a unique restaurant event, request ideas for new menu items or specials of the day, offer prizes to Twitter followers, and even use it as a tool to listen and converse with your customers.

Food trucks have perhaps used the 140 character messages of Twitter most effectively to connect directly with their customers and to create an almost cult-like followings through social media marketing. Social media is critical for food truck vendors to build a name, to inform thousands of potential customers about moving locations in a timely manner, and directly engage with customer base

Ratings Mean Revenues
In a recent Yahoo article about Yelp and its impact on the restaurant industry, it was found that an online rating can seriously influence a restaurant’s revenues. A one-star improvement in rating correlated to an increase in revenue, usually falling between the five and nine percent market.

Yelp.com is a “free online guide that helps people find cool places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play, based on the opinions of an active community of locals in the know. Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great, and not so great.”

While serving quality food has always been critical to a restaurant’s success, that effect is much more pronounced with the proliferation of social media. A bad experience can be shared through social media much quicker than it can circulate through a community by word of mouth. On the positive side, that also means a restaurant can build a positive reputation at a much faster pace. While a new restaurant used to take several months to build a presence, sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon let word spread quickly. A new restaurant serving quality food will become profitable a lot faster with the help of social media than it otherwise would.

Food Products Are Going Viral
The KFC Double Down is a perfect example of this effect. In April 2011, KFC came out with the Double Down, a breadless “sandwich” that features melted cheese, bacon, and sauce between two chicken filets.

In June, the trend had clearly caught on when Friendly’s introduced its Ultimate Grilled Cheese Burgermelt, a burger patty between two grilled cheese sandwiches. In the past when chain restaurants rolled out new items, they were confined to a small market and the impact of the item was only local, but when the Double Down was released the presence of social media caused it to become a national topic. Because of instances like this, analysts have predicted that companies will make even more outrageous products. According to analysts, this won’t be in order to just test new items, instead, chains will test items in order to create a social media buzz. Despite being highly criticized, the Double Down got people to talk about KFC, and that’s something that any chain operator is hungry for!

Mobile Tech

Gaining access to consumers as they go about their daily lives via the mobile phone is a marketing holy grail, especially for restaurants, which can benefit immensely from being able to reach consumers at that crucial moment when craving strikes. Furthermore, it can help create a more enjoyable and efficient customer experience by allowing customers to text their orders in ahead of time, easily transfer their personal ordering history from one location to another, and receive discounts on their smartphones at the point of purchase, just to name a few mobile phone capabilities.

In January 2011, Starbucks rolled out a Starbucks Card Mobile app that allows customers to “touch and pay” for their purchases which can be used at nearly 7,000 Starbucks across the United States. This was available for both the Apple iPhone and BlackBerry applications. Like the long-standing Starbucks Card, users are now given the option to add cash to their account, but rather than keeping a plastic card in their wallets, users hold their phones up to a scanner, which recognizes a unique barcode the app presents on the phone’s screen. As a bonus incentive for Starbucks customers, purchases made through the app qualify for Starbucks’ rewards program, thus allowing customers to earn free drinks. The app even helps users find the nearest Starbucks store.
 

Social Media Users Eat Too!
Restaurants need to cater to their audience. While some industries have chosen not to embrace social media, the fact is that for many restaurants social media IS the audience.

What’s clear from what I found is that, while no industry exists in a bubble, restaurants are especially susceptible to social media reception. A negative review can translate into lost dollars, while glowing reviews can help reshape an establishment’s image. With that in mind, it’s clear the social media is radically helping the restaurant industry in terms of marketing, creating brand awareness, engaging consumers, and much more. The effectiveness of social media is something to be taken seriously in the restaurant industry.