Social Media Tools for Restaurants
June 9, 2009 :: Steve FisherIn all honesty, Shashi should be writing this post since our Social Media Swami used to be an Executive Chef that worked all over the world, but you have me a guy that by all views of photos in the last few years, loves food. What I can offer you is my passion for social media along with a buyer’s perspective on what restaurants are doing well and what they are missing to take advantage of social media.
Recently, we have piloted a class on social media for small businesses that was given to our customers. It was a huge success and we will be seeing more of that class in the future. However, in the short term we realized that serving all of our small businesses meant that we should tune some of our education to those local small business segments that are fairly common in every town. The first that should come to mind is your local restaurant and an article from David Finch over at Social Media Explorer really got me motivated to expand on the super successful event that Network Solutions and Yelp gave a few weeks ago at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC.
There is a great recap here and the stream can be viewed here.
In David’s post, his first two are the most important:
“-Make sure your restaurant can be searched and reviewed through local business guides such as Yelp.com, Urbanspoon.com, and TripAdvisor.com
-Suggest that positive feedback from patrons be shared on these social business guide sites.”
David has a list of other tools but I would recommend that if you are a small restaurant owner and are not using social media that you do the following six things:
- Do David’s first two recommendations
- Set up Google Alerts – This is the way to track what people are saying about you on the web – Most basic but most important
- Get on Twitter – Use it to build a following and promote it to customers. Also if someone mentions that they are on their way there or had a great meal you can give them a discount. You can also send out “Specials of the Day or other promotions” – See @citizencake for a great example of this
- Gather emails – I know it sounds old school but if you are doing email newsletters, you can subscribe them to a blog with FeedBlitz when you decide to move over/expand to a blog
- Set up a Facebook Fan Page – People that are foodies and loyal customers will become fans especially if you use the channel to send promotions or special deals to bring them back
We got some very positive feedback from our restaurant customers and are looking into putting together a class specifically to teach restaurants how to use social media. We will eventually bring this to an online webinar as well. Let us know your thoughts and experiences on using restaurant tools and if you are a restauranteur, let us know what you would like to learn.
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