Focusing on Facebook by Peter Cooke

Building Your Restaurantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Digital Identity Focusing on

Everyone LIKES

Over 600 Million people are registered users of Facebook. Are you? Your customers certainly are. As the reigning King of Social Networking, Facebook is the one you can’t ignore. Even if you don’t know a tweet from a Foursquare, you need to be tapping into Facebook’s unmatched potential as a cheap/free platform to connect with your customers and spread the word about your restaurant. On the following pages, we’ve collected some insightful tips and ideas to help jumpstart or reﬁne your Facebook marketing campaign.

apps you should know

sites you should know

b u i l d i n g yo u r re s t a u r a n t ’s d i gi t a l i d e n t i t y

apps you should know + sites you should know If you’re just starting out in the world of Social Media, ask your Sysco Marketing Associate for these helpful ﬂyers.

How to Start Marketing on Facebook It’s no secret: U.S. consumers continue to spend increasing amounts of time on Facebook. Consequently, marketers — lured by Facebook’s suite of highly targeted marketing products and the site’s smooth ability to spread information across networks of friends — are investing increasing amounts of capital in the platform. Facebook‘s proposition is especially attractive to small business owners, and not just because it enables them to hone in on potential customers through highly targeted, paid advertisements. Facebook also allows them to grow their business in a way that is familiar to many of them — through word-of-mouth marketing.

http://www.mashable.com May 25, 2011 Article by Lauren Indvik

“Ask [small business owners] how they get customers, and they’ll tell you that someone walks in, has a great experience, walks out and tells a couple of their friends,” says Emily White, senior director of local at Facebook. “Now, that word-of-mouth marketing model is happening online, and Facebook is enabling that to happen at scale. Now [small business owners] aren’t just reaching a few customers’ friends, but all of their friends, mimicking these long-term behaviors in a way that small businesses can actually control,” she explains. With these ideas in mind, we’ve compiled this six-step guide for getting started on Facebook.

1. Set up your Facebook Page

Setting up a public Page for your small business is as simple as visiting facebook.com/pages/create.php, selecting a category that describes your business and ﬁlling out a few basic details, such as the name of your business and, if applicable, its address.

Facebook will then send you to a template of your Page, which you can spruce up with a proﬁle photo, further details such as hours (see Info tab on left-hand sidebar). You can also identify additional Page administrators (see Info > Manage Admins), add more multimedia and events (Info > Apps) and adjust the settings to control how users can contribute to your Page (Info > Manage Permissions).

It’s also a good time to post your ﬁrst status update welcoming fans to your Page. You can share your updates with everyone, or target by location or language — a great option if you run a business in multiple locations.

2. Invite Your Friends After your Page is set up, you’ll want to invite your friends to “like” your Page. Once you’ve amassed 25 fans, you’ll be able to set up a vanity URL, e.g. facebook.com/mashable. Go to the Username page, select the Page name from the dropdown menu and then write in the name you’d like to use. Keep in mind that you can’t change the URL for a Page once you conﬁrm.

3. Customize Your Page There a number of apps to help you customize your page beyond the standard layout, which can be found in the Applications Directory. There, you’ll ﬁnd apps that will let you create polls, add more content to your Info tab, oﬀer coupons, showcase your YouTube videos and more.

4. Convert Your Existing Customers Into Likes

Once you’re feeling conﬁdent about the look of your Page, your next step, Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow suggests, is to leverage all of your owned media assets — your mailing list, e-mail newsletter and signature, store window, website, business cards, etc. — to grow your fan base. Let them know you’re there, and provide an immediate incentive for them to connect, such as a discount or giveaway. “This will increase your conversions signiﬁcantly,” Lazerow says. “Since your Page is a ghost town at this point, you need to give people an incentive to connect at the onset. The best way to do that is to give them a ‘thank you.’”

5. Engage As you build up your fan base, you’ll want to provide a stream of interesting content that will entertain and engage your fans. Anna Strahs, the owner of a gluten-free bakery in Richmond, VA, attributes half of her business to Facebook. She says she keeps fans coming back for more by posting pictures of the items she’s baked that day. “When we post pictures of speciﬁc items, we immediately get orders for those items,” she says — and it’s no wonder, because they look delicious. Strahs says she will also post little quizzes in exchange for free baked goods, which winners can pick up at one of two farmers market locations two days each week. Her advice? Post often and make the posts count. She emphasizes that beautiful images with contextual captions go a long way. “The whole point is to get people to comment and interact with your Page so it shows up in others’ newsfeeds,” she explains. It’s also important to keep content fresh, update in an authentic voice and to evolve your Facebook strategy over time. Remember to keep track of analytics on your Insights page to see what kinds of posts performance best in terms of engagement. And seek feedback directly from your fans. Are you posting too little or too often? What kinds of things would they like to see?

6. Advertise

Once you’ve converted most of your existing customer base into Facebook fans, you’ll want to start reaching others through targeted Facebook ads, which is still the most eﬀective method for increasing your number of “likes,” says Maureen Mullen, chief researcher at luxury think tank L2. You can target users in your immediate area by gender, age, alma mater, employer, and even those who “like” your competition. You could also target users on their birthdays, oﬀering them a free ice cream cone, for instance, if they stop by your store that day. You can also target existing fans with coupons and other incentives to encourage them to stop by your retail location or place an order. Facebook also has a Sponsored Stories product that enables you to reach the friends of your current fans. In your advertisement, a user will see that one of their friends has endorsed your company, essentially enabling a fan to market on your behalf.

Additional Resources

As you grow your fanbase and look for new customer acquisition strategies, you may want to look into Facebook Deals, which lets you reward fans for checking in to your retail location using Facebook Places, and thereby notifying all of their friends that they stopped by. You might also want to consider working with one of Facebook’s preferred app developers to further build out your Facebook Page with customized modules, such as appointment bookings or integrated e-commerce opportunities. You could even look into advertising opportunities with major game developers such as Zynga, which has partnered with large and small businesses alike to advertise products to its large userbase.

8 brands that have found success on Facebook and what we can learn by Dave Kerpen

http://www.mashable.com

May 24, 2011

Any brand worth their social media salt has a presence on Facebook. But just because a brand is online, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is doing a good job. While it’s possible to suggest some tips and best practices, there’s no greater teacher than learning from example. Below, ﬁnd eight brands that have found success on Facebook, including some takeaways on what they did right and how you can emulate their success.

1. The Pampered Chef The Pampered Chef launched their Facebook page at a national conference in front of thousands of enthusiastic consultants. The page earned 10,000 likes in its ﬁrst 24 hours and now has over 260,000 likes.

Lesson: Ask your staﬀ, customers, vendors, and partners — who already know you and like you — to “Like” your Facebook page ﬁrst.

2. Restaurant.com Restaurant.com combines exclusive Facebook oﬀers with lots of engaging questions. This drives higher results in users’ newsfeeds because of Facebook’s EdgeRank formula. Last week for instance, they asked, “When the weather is nice, do you prefer to dine on the restaurant’s outdoor patio or stay indoors?” and “Which American Idol ﬁnalist would you like to dine with — Haley, Lauren, or Scotty?”

Lesson: Ask a lot of questions. You’ll get valuable feedback, plus you’ll be more likely to appear in your fans’ newsfeeds.

3. Oreo Oreo is a global brand with over 19 million fans, and yet they still manage to make things personal for their fans. They consistently run fun content, creative pictures and links. They also have a “World’s Fan of the Week” that showcases one Oreo fan in their proﬁle picture based on uploaded fan photos.

Lesson: Share lots of photos, and ask your fans to share photos. Facebook’s Photos remain the most viral feature of its platform.

4. Vitamin Water Vitamin Water has been trailblazing on Facebook for years, including crowdsourcing an entirely new ﬂavor back in 2009. Today, they have over 2.3 million fans with frequent posts featuring pictures, videos, events and links. Most importantly, they are responsive to fan questions and inquiries, breeding loyalty even when their answers aren’t exactly what customers want to hear.

Lesson: Find the resources to respond to your fans questions and inquiries.

5. Boloco Boloco is a Boston restaurant which has set up their Fan Page as a “Place” Page, allowing people to check-in. In addition to using the Reviews app to solicit and showcase reviews, Boloco is engaging and has fun with their audience. Most importantly, as a Place Page, they can leverage one of Facebook’s newest features, Deals, oﬀering customers speciﬁc and local specials.

Lesson: If you have a physical location, use Place Pages and Deals to drive traﬃc through your doors.

6. LOFT Last June, LOFT upset its fans after they posted a series of photos of super-thin models wearing their clothing. So the very next day, they apologized and shared photos of their own staﬀ, of various shapes and sizes, wearing the line. Fans responded enthusiastically, and since then LOFT’s Fan Page has grown from 50,000 fans to 250,000 fans. They also post a lot on weekends, when their audience is online and there’s less competition from other brands.

Lesson: Know your audience well, and when you make a mistake, quickly own up, do right by your audience and ﬁx the problem.

7. 1-800-FLOWERS 1-800-Flowers.com was one of the ﬁrst brands to establish buying opportunities inside Facebook, and now leverages in-stream sales. But the most important thing they’ve done is to deeply integrate Facebook onto their website, putting the Like button on all products. Imagine visiting an ecommerce website and seeing what products the person you’re buying a gift for “Liked” — it would make choosing the right gift a lot easier, wouldn’t it?

Lesson: Integrate Facebook outside of your Fan Page, on your website, in as many places as you can. Create more compelling opportunities for people to buy your product based on their friends’ Likes.

8. Brooklyn Museum This local non-proﬁt has used pictures and an art app called Wall Paper to attract more than 37,000 fans. One thing they do particularly well is engage other entities. A look at their Wall shows lots of artist pages and other organization’s pages interacting with the Museum’s page — not just the fans.

Lesson: Find synergy with other organizations and entities, and then work together to promote each other’s Facebook pages so that everyone beneﬁts.

4 creative ways to reward your Facebook fans www.mashable.com

May 31, 2011

By Leyl Master Black

A key part of your Facebook marketing strategy is ﬁguring out how to build and engage your fan base — and one of the best ways to do this is by rewarding your Facebook audience for becoming and staying fans. “Fans have signaled a level of passion or connection with a brand, so rewarding that acknowledgement only further endears the brand to those fans,” says Blake Cahill, principal and president of social media agency Banyan Branch. “Giving fans what they want can vary from discounts, to empowering them to support causes, to providing them with exclusive content and information. In many cases, success is a mix of all of these.” Here are four great ways to reward your Facebook fans for their continued engagement and support.

1. Offer Exclusive Discounts, Coupons and Content Discounts and specials are definitely among the most popular ways of rewarding Facebook fans, says Ron Schott, senior strategist at the Spring Creek Group. “One of my favorite hotel chains, Provenance Hotels, offers specials to their Facebook (and Twitter) fans: If you book rooms through those channels, you can receive a percentage off your stay as well as free Wi-Fi access,” says Schott. Schott also notes that there are a number of restaurants offering a special reservation opportunity to Facebook fans. “This can be accomplished as easily as displaying a tab on your Facebook Page with a special number or code to use when booking,” adds Schott. Some companies tie discounts and coupons to engagement activities. Capriotti’s, a popular chain of Italian restaurants, gives out free sandwich coupons to fans who correctly answer questions about Capriotti’s history or participate in online contests. For example, the restaurant recently posted a clip from a local TV appearance on its Facebook Page and asked fans if they could spot the two wrong facts in the piece. The first person to do so was sent a voucher for a free sub. There are also low-cost applications you can use to create custom fan-only tabs for your Facebook Page. For example, actor and author Rob Lowe used Fan Tabz to create a custom “Fan Wall” on his Page, where he shares exclusive content and excerpts from his new book Stories I Only Tell My Friends with people who “like” his Page.

2. Help Fans Give Back Many companies also reward fans by helping them give back, tying charitable donations to the growth of their fan base. Hosiery and legwear company No Nonsense recently kicked oﬀ a program in which it is donating one million pairs of socks to needy children and families across the country. The campaign, called “Socks for America,” allows consumers to donate a pair of socks in their name to a person in need simply by becoming a fan on No nonsense’s Facebook Page. Another great example is Idaho-based Dynamite Specialty Products, which makes all-natural dog food. Last year, the company pledged to give a pound of dog food to the Idaho Humane Society for every new Facebook fan. It ended up donating 2,800 pounds, which is worth $4,200 and is enough to feed 200 dogs for almost six months. “We wanted to spread the word about Dynamite, and we knew that for many of our customers, giving to a charity actually would be more of a motivation to help than a personal prize or special oﬀer. People who buy our products are passionate about their animals and about making the world a better place,” said Callie Novak, Dynamite’s CEO.

3. Show You’re Listening One of the best ways to reward fans for their continued support is by showing them you’re listening to their opinions and feedback. Tony Pham, VP of marketing at family safety startup Life360, notes

that building an authentic rapport with customers is a big part of the company’s success growing to over two million families using its products. “The company has seen that providing targeted content and resources is appreciated because of the trusted relationship we have with the families using Life360,” says Pham. “We ﬁgure out what our users want to learn about by taking polls and hosting quizzes. Then, when we provide material that delivers what they said they wanted, it demonstrates that were really listening to our community and providing them with added value.” Showing you’re listening can be as easy as responding to each and every comment and question on your Page. Social media strategist Alex Levine notes that, “Attention is a highly undervalued reward to Facebook fans. Reward your Facebook fans by acknowledging each comment people post to your questions. Not only does this provide (nearly) immediate gratiﬁcation for fans, but it also encourages the behavior, thus greatly improving the probability and volume of their future engagement with your brand.” Want to take it up a notch? Honda really showed it was listening during its “We’re Fans of You Too” Week on Facebook, during which it recognized some of the innovative ways fans have shown their love for the brand over the years by mirroring these activities on their own. For example, a fan carved a Honda logo into their lawn, so Honda carved that fan’s name into their corporate headquarters’ lawn at the main entrance. A fan revealed his love for Honda with his Honda logo tattoo; Honda’s vice president of marketing got an airbrushed tattoo of the fan’s name and face. A fan requested a special Honda haircut at his barber; a Honda associate got that fan’s name carved in his hair, too.

4. Recognize Individual Fans One completely free way to reward and recognize fans is to showcase an individual fan on your Page. Social media consultant Sarah Evans of PR and new media consultancy Sevans Strategy suggests that you “select a fan of the week. Interview the individual, post it on the Page and encourage dialogue around the person, not your brand. You can reward people with this honor who frequently contribute to the page or are loyal customers.” Schott agrees. “Recognizing individual fans is a great way to reward users for being a part of the community and also [for brands] to show that they care at the same time. The user gets a kick out of it because their friends now see them displayed in all their glory and the business climbs a couple notches higher on that brand preference ladder.” Finally, Evans recommends not calling your fans, “fans.” She suggests giving them “a much cooler or more unique title.” “Make them feel like the special customers they are,” says Evans. “They did take the time to ‘like’ your page.

How to claim your business on Facebook Places http://www.mashable.com June 27, 2011

by Sarah Kessler

Facebook Places is essentially free word-of-mouth advertising for your business. When customers check in, they’ll automatically be telling their Facebook friends about it. If you run a small business with a street entrance, there’s a good chance that it’s already a part of Facebook Places — with or without your input. By claiming your Page, you have the opportunity to customize that free advertising. It also makes it easy to purchase pay-per-click advertising for your Places page. Here’s how to get started.

1. Add Your Business to Facebook Places

2. Search For Your Business on Facebook

Open the Facebook app on your mobile phone. Depending on which device you have, you’ll either hit “Places” or “Check In” on the home screen of the app. Type the name of your business in the search bar. If there’s no listing for your business, there will be an option in the search results menu to add it. You can do so by adding a description and selecting “add.” If your business has already been added to Facebook Places, you can skip this step.

Open Facebook on your desktop and search for your business.

3. Claim Your Place Beneath the image on the Places page there is a hyperlink that says, “Is this your business?” If it is, click it to start the veriﬁcation process.

Click on the Places result.

4. Verify Your Listing Before Facebook will let you edit the page, they ask for either a business email address or a document that has your name and business’ name on it. After you supply either, it can take up to a week for Facebook to conﬁrm your request.

Important Questions Can I merge my Place with an existing Fan Page for my business? • Yes. Go to your Facebook Place and click “Merge with existing Page.” Can I unmerge my Page from Place? • As of December, yes. Can I advertise my Place the same way I advertise my Page? • Yes. Click “I want to advertise something I have on Facebook” in the ad creation ﬂow and choose your Place from the drop-down menu. Can I target ads to people who visit my Place? • Not yet.

www.openforum.com May 24, 2011 Article by Erica Swallow

5 easy ways to liven up your Facebook stream As more advertisers and brand marketers realize the value of social media, they are ﬂocking to set up Pages on Facebook, the largest social network of them all. The stats are impressive. 50% of Facebook’s more than 500 million active users are creating and consuming content on the social network on any given day, and the average U.S. user spends nearly six hours per month browsing around on the social network. With the shift to growing social media consumption, brands should be taking every step to improve their presences on social platforms, starting with the behemoth that is Facebook. Whether your business is new to the platform or it has been around for years, there is always room for improvement. Here are ﬁve quick and easy ways to make your Facebook stream more lively for fans.

3. Give ‘em Something to Consume With such high engagement stats, Facebook has brands and content creators turning heads. Etsy, the commerce platform for handmade goods, is among the brands on Facebook that understands its following and then creates and curates content to ﬁt its needs. As expected, Etsy’s Facebook Page features a stream of the quirkiest products that are oﬀered on its site. But the page also features a fair amount of original and curated content, including blog posts and videos that would be of interest to its followers. Some of the content originates from the Etsy Blog. While many of the links and videos are purely for fun, these pieces often start conversations among Etsy fans on the Page.

4. Ask Questions

1. Showcase Your Customers

Paint Along NYC, a New York City-based company oﬀering painting workshops, uses Facebook to build its online community. After each painting class, the instructor uploads photos of the attendees with their works of art to the Paint Along NYC Facebook Page. Each photo album is labeled with the date of the class and the item that was painted, so that customers can easily ﬁnd and tag their pictures. During class, the instructor makes sure that attendees are aware that their photos can be found on the company’s public Facebook Page.

2. Have a Sense of Humor Humor is said to increase a person’s levels of happiness and hope, so why not share happiness via Facebook? Jules Thin Crust, a group of organic pizza shops in Pennsylvania, runs its Facebook Page with humor and community in mind. Operated by owner John Ordway and multiple store managers, the Jules Facebook Page has a very homey feeling. The Jules social media team doesn’t take itself too seriously — an advantage that many small businesses have over large branding-dominated corporations. When Facebook fans joke around, Jules Facebook admins are comfortable jumping right in there with the fun. The casual tone used by Jules staﬀers — and the fact that they personally know some of the fans — makes the updates more personable, relevant and relatable.

It’s not enough to be broadcasting promotional messages — brands should make an effort at engaging with their audiences. Asking questions is a great way to kick off that two-way dialogue. Take a look at any brand page on Facebook — it’s quite likely that posts with questions get more action than ones without questions. ReadyMade magazine, for example, mixes up the format of posts on its Facebook Page. Posts with questions seem to prompt more conversation, especially if the question is easy to answer. People are inclined to offer their opinions, especially when it’s so simple to get involved.

5. Take Us Behind the Curtain Whether you own a restaurant, a tech startup or a construction company, your customers are interested in who works at your company and what goes on behind the scenes. And so, providing a glimpse behind the curtain can be an eﬀective and engaging way to populate your Facebook Page. You may think there aren’t many ways to make a car dealership more interesting or welcoming, but a well-run Facebook Page helps one New Jersey dealership exude a friendly vibe. Lester Glenn Auto Group uses Facebook to promote the cars it sells, announce philanthropic projects and make small talk with customers. Recent posts about holidays and summer camps have seen success relative to other posts, probably because of their non-promotional and down-to-earth tone. The page also features lots of pictures from inside the dealership, including ones that highlight employees and events. A recent post, for example, celebrates the birthday of Internet Sales Rep Stacy Myers. These depictions of life at the dealership give fans a look inside the company, and they also help to humanize the brand.

10 Tips for posting on your Facebook page www.mashable.com March 22, 2011 Article by Ekaterina Walter Once your brand is on Facebook, the question becomes how you engage those fans and sustain a meaningful online dialogue with your customers. Facebook fans will only want to engage with us if we serve up relevant content and truly participate. We also forget about EdgeRank — Facebook’s News Feed algorithm that helps display “relevant” stories. The News Feed only displays a small subset of stories generated by the friends and brands users engage with the most. The more popular your story, the more likely it is to show up in people’s News Feed. News Feed optimization becomes as important as your content strategy.

My favorite example of this was Budweiser letting their fans choose the commercial that would run during the 2010 Super Bowl.

5. Do Target Your Status Updates If you are a global brand, make good use of targeting. We sometimes forget that not all of our fans want to know about campaigns or contests we are running in a speciﬁc region or country. Target your updates by country or language as necessary. In the U.S. you can even target by state and city.

6. Do Ask Questions and Involve Your Fans Let’s explore ways we can create updates that are optimized for the News Feed and engagement. Below are some do’s and don’ts to remember each time you tackle that all-important question, “What should we post to our Facebook Page today?”

1. Don’t Automate Your Status Updates

Want your fans to express their views on a topic? Ask them. Want your fans to share their favorite content with you? Ask them. Want your fans to share your content? Ask them. You get the point. If you want your fans to participate more, just ask them every now and then; you will be surprised how many of them respond. Multiple experiments by other brands and yours truly show that the posts where you include a call to action get better than average engagement.

Don’t automatically feed your blog posts or your Twitter updates into your Page. Often, automated content doesn’t make it into users’ News Feeds. Your fans can also distinguish between “auto” posts and customized ones. For a lot of brand pages, auto posts do not engender engagement.

7. Do Watch Your Post Frequency and Timing

Don’t share the exact same content across all networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) in exactly the same format. We all understand the value of saving time, but respect your customers enough to manually post customized copy. You will get far better engagement and show your fans you care. Some folks who use Facebook don’t really like Twitter and get irritated when they see hashtags or other Twitter-speciﬁc content in their Facebook stream.

Don’t overwhelm your fans with too many posts. I suggest posting once a day to start with and potentially moving to twice a day, especially if you have great news to share. As far as timing goes, many people catch up on their Facebook activity at the end of the day and during weekends. However, this trend varies, and might be diﬀerent for your target audience. Be patient, watch the response trends on your Page, and identify the frequency and timing that works best for you.

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Show You’re Human

8. Do Have a Unique Voice

Thank your fans for their replies and for sharing their opinions with you. From time to time, talk about things other than your products. Wish them happy holidays. Ask them fun questions or to share their personal stories.

It is important to know your voice. Skittles does a good job maintaining a consistent brand voice on their Facebook Page. It’s entertaining, funny and refreshing.

If you make a mistake — admit it. Everyone knows you are human, and no one expects you to be perfect. You will actually score points for admitting that instead of trying to hide it.

That is not to say that you shouldn’t experiment and step outside your comfort zone to see what else might work for you. Find a voice and tone that is representative of your brand and yourself.

9. Do Diversify Your Content Don’t be afraid of negative comments or people posting on sensitive topics. You’ll ﬁnd that most of the time your fans will jump in and defend you or address these comments for you. And that carries much more weight than you trying to chime in. And at the end of the day, this is your opportunity to turn haters into loyalists by providing timely responses and great customer service.

Change up your content every now and then. Often, people are not sure what to post on a regular basis. You could try adding how-tos, trivia about your company, breaking news, polls, ﬁll-in-the-blanks, relevant third-party content, multimedia, or even experts to speak about your ﬁeld or business.

10. Do Track the Performance of Your Posts 3. Do Post More Photos and Videos Media like videos and photos always perform well on Facebook. Not only do they seem to be a favorite of the News Feed algorithm, but they just grab people’s attention in a feed full of text updates. A lot of web users choose to watch more than they read. Facebook also oﬀers you a nice little feature that helps bring more fans to your Page. If you post a video and a non-fan of your Page sees it, a little non-intrusive call to action will pop up in the top-left corner that invites them to Like your Page.

4. Do Put Your Fans in Charge Every Now and Then Not afraid to crowdsource? Your Facebook Page is a perfect place for it. Not only will your fans feel valued and heard, but some of their decisions might help your content strategy in the long run. Let’s face it — sometimes we don’t always make choices that resonate with our customers.

Do you know your average number of comments and Likes per post? Watch for trends on your Page and feedback from your consumers on topics/programs/discussions and adjust your content strategy appropriately. Don’t become complacent. Hopefully these tips will help you gain an edge on EdgeRank, and put your brand on top. Good luck! _____________________________________________________ Ekaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy.

Speed matters when it comes to Facebook Firm ranks chains by how fast they respond to fans No matter how large a marketing department it has, a restaurant company simply can’t respond to every complaint or question it receives on its Facebook wall. However, regardless of how many comments a restaurant brand answers, the speed at which the chain responds can give it a significant marketing advantage, according to Expion, a socialmedia management software firm. Raleigh, N.C.-based Expion conducted a study of restaurant responsiveness on Facebook over a 90-day period from Feb. 15 to May 12, and ranked casual-dining chains as well as fast-casual and quick-service brands by which companies responded the fastest to messages posted by fans on their Facebook pages. How many comments a restaurant may choose to answer is a matter of strategy, but speed is always imperative, said Peter Heffring, president of Expion, whose restaurant clients include Applebee’s Grill & Bar. “If the comment truly is a post you should respond to, whatever that percentage may be, when you take the time to respond, you should do it quickly,” Heffring said. “Clearly, you can’t be taking a day to respond, and brands ought to strive to get around two to three hours. The percentage of responses is up to your strategy, like if you only respond to negative posts.” Expion broke its study into two groups: casual-dining brands with at least 100,000 Facebook “likes,” and fast-casual or quick-service brands with at least 250,000 “likes.” Only chains’ responses to original wall posts from fans counted toward the brands’ rankings; comments within a post from the company did not factor into results. Expion did not differentiate whether the responses it tracked were answering positive or negative comments from fans.

www.nrn.com May 18, 2011 Article by Mark Brandau

Chipotle: 'Nearly everything warrants a response' Chipotle Mexican Grill responded to comments on its Facebook wall in an average time of 1 hour and 37 minutes, which qualified as the fourth-fastest time in the quick-service and fast-casual group. Starbucks Coffee’s average response time of 34 minutes led all brands in Expion’s study. The average response time for the fast-casual and quick-service grouping was 6 hours and 34 minutes. That segment’s average rate of response was 28 percent of all messages received on brands’ Facebook walls. Chipotle led all fast-casual and quick-service chains in response rate, answering 83 percent of all questions, criticisms and commendations that fans left on the wall. Chris Arnold, spokesman for Chipotle, said the brand has been locked out of its Facebook account on occasion because the platform reads its voracious commenting activity as spam. The brand takes an all-hands-on-deck approach to answering comments on Facebook and Twitter, from a dedicated social-media manager down to staffers drawn from the local-store marketing and customer service teams. “We think nearly everything warrants a response,” Arnold said. “For a company like ours where so much of the marketing is driven by word-of-mouth and things that feed word-of-mouth, these platforms are really great tools to use.” (continued on following page)

KFC: Most comments ‘don’t require immediate response’

Casual brands take their time

KFC takes a more selective approach to answering comments. While it takes 3 hours and 2 minutes on average to respond to wall posts, the brand only answered 9 percent of those comments in Expion’s 90-day study, which tied it with Panda Express for the lowest rate of response.

As a segment, casual dining averaged more responses than quick service and fast casual, answering 32 percent of the messages posted on their Facebook pages. However, the segment’s average response time was slower on average at 8 hours and 56 minutes.

Like Chipotle, KFC has a “social-media squad” tasked with monitoring the brand’s Facebook page and responding to questions, complaints or commendations, said spokesman Rick Maynard. He said KFC’s discerning approach to responsiveness comes from prioritizing criticism above praise. “A majority of the comments on our page are fairly general and don’t require an immediate response from us,” he said. “For the ones that fall into the customer service category, we respond to those as quickly as possible.” KFC and Panda Express both rank in the top 10 for response time in the quick-service grouping. “One of our key commitments is to respond to any customer needs as quickly as possible,” Maynard said. “It’s validating to know that we are above average in this area, but we are committed to doing even better.”

In that segment, Buffalo Wild Wings had the fastest response time, with an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes. The chicken wing specialist responded to 22 percent of its comments. Famous Dave’s led the segment in the rate of response, answering 89 percent of customer comments on its Facebook wall. The barbecue chain just missed the top 10 in the segment’s rankings of response time, answering in an average of 6 hours and 43 minutes. Expion president Heffring speculated that the faster average response time for quick-service and fast-casual brands probably results from those brands’ larger scale and higher spending on social-media marketing. Larger brands are more likely to have extra staff or a marketing agency to help monitor their Facebook pages, even after normal business hours, he said. “I would bet if I could do this study [accounting only for responses] from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the casual-dining restaurants and QSRs would be closer to each other on response time,” he said.

www.openforum.com June 9, 2011 Article by Scott Belsky

3 Tips on Marketing Your Business in the Facebook Era The modern era has provided many new mediums for marketing our businesses. Aside from the traditional mediums of television, newspapers and magazines, we can now use a whole new array of mechanisms to spread our message: online advertising, blogs, Twitter streams, Facebook pages, and the list goes on. With so many options, we are faced with the challenge of keeping our message in sync across all mediums. As small business leaders, we often make the mistake of simply re-posting the message from one medium to another. And when we do take the time to create a Facebook or Twitter presence, we do so haphazardly and often fail to maintain the campaign over time. Here are a few best practices to consider as you market across various platforms. 1. Understand the tone of the medium The way you describe your product or service on your website will be different from what you say and do in other mediums such as social networking sites, offline advertising and other communications. Facebook is most effective when advertising is presented in the context of friends and social activity. On Twitter, brands succeed when they serve as curators of interesting facts and casually communicate with users. Before embarking on marketing activities in different places, be sure to observe the tone for a while and then assume that tone as you participate.

2. Be mindful of context I've seen a lot of companies stumble by targeting the right people at the wrong time. Your target audience will only engage with your brand —and listen to your message—when the context makes sense. For example, trying to sell accounting services to people while they are using Facebook to respond to friends is probably not the right time. However, there might be other mediums where your target audience is more in the mindset of professional services like accounting. Consider the mindset of your target audience and the drivers that bring them to the medium you are marketing in. 3. Avoid sending an inconsistent message While you should certainly adjust tone and strategy for diﬀerent mediums, it is important that your company's purpose remain clear and consistent. Authenticity is more important than anything else. The value proposition you oﬀer your customers should never change. While you may tweak the tone, you should never alter the core message. You should certainly diversify the way you market your business, but always with an unwavering sense of your brand and why you are in business. Ask yourself, "What medium is my customer most likely to use when they need my product/service the most?" With attention to tone, context and consistency, you will be prepared to start experimenting with marketing across mediums.

A First Look at Facebook’s New Deals

April 25, 2011 By Jolie O’Dell

Facebook’s new Deals feature launched Tuesday April 26 in five U.S. cities. Here’s a first glimpse of how those offers look and function.

the site or opt to buy it right away. When purchasing the deal, users can pay with credit card or Facebook Credits.

First, users who opt into Deals will get to see opportunities speciﬁc to their locations. Those oﬀers will arrive via email or, in some cases, will appear in the user’s news feed on Facebook.

It’s unknown whether Facebook will make more money from Credits purchases than from traditional ones. “We’re not disclosing details about revenue splits, but paying with Credits will work the same way as paying with a credit card,” said a Facebook representative via email. “It’s simply another way for people to pay for Deals. We think this just makes things easier for people using Facebook.”

To be clear, these aren’t like the check-in based deals for mobile users that Facebook launched for its nascent Places platform; while the initial mobile Deals product competed with Foursquare, the new product competes more with Groupon. Each deal will have its own Facebook landing page, as shown in the gallery below. Users can “Like” a deal, share it via several channels on

http://wwwmashable.com

Check out the gallery below for a walkthrough of signing up for, ﬁnding, buying and sharing the new Facebook Deals.

http://www.thebarblogger.com May 3, 2011

What Facebook Deals Means for your Bar or Restaurant On top of News Feed exposure, Facebook will have a deals tab that shows up on your home page. Much like messages you receive or event requests, a notiﬁcation and number of deals will appear on the left hand site of your home page.

Recently, Facebook launched a trial run of its new service, Facebook Deals, in ﬁve cities: Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco. For those of you who haven’t subscribed to Facebook Deals yet, it is a group-based coupon deal service.

Once you click on the deals tab, this is what you’ll see.

Facebook Deals, once it’s scaled out to more cities, will offer discounts to groups of people in social situations. You’ll see these discounts on movie tickets, concert tickets, restaurant prices and much more. In order to purchase the deal, you can use your credit card or any Facebook credits that you may have. Once you’ve purchased the deal, you print out the coupon and reedem it! Sounds kind of like Groupon and LivingSocial, right? Well, there are some differences. First of all, it’s unclear if Facebook Deals will require a certain number of purchases per deal for that deal to go into effect, like Groupon and LivingSocial. Beyond that, Facebook Deals, because of the nature of Facebook, will have more exposure. Just like links to news stories and videos shared on walls, you can “like” the daily deals and have it show up on your News Feed. Depending on how many people purchase and like a deal, its exposure could continue to multiply. Currently, users who have not yet subscribed to deals might see this on their page:

So what does this mean for your bar or restaurant? Right now, we know that Facebook isn’t planning on taking a substantial percentage (if any) of whatever profits a deal makes. Groupon, on the other hand, can take as much as 50%. Right now – there are more than 500 billion Facebook users. Besides Facebook’s extremely large audience, its users are also sharers. We share content by posting it to our page, sending it to our Facebook friends, “liking” it in your News Feed. If you purchase a deal with Groupon or LivingSocial that you were informed of through an email, how will your friends see that? Facebook Deals offers instant exposure through the sharing and “liking” of the content (or deals, in this case). Facebook wants to offer that can increase revenue for your business. These deals won’t necessarily always be like the ones on Groupon or LivingSocial. “You won’t get your legs waxed with friends,” Emily White, Facebook’s director of local operations, told The Financial Times in March. “You dine out, you go to concerts, and you do outdoor activities. We want to make sure those experiences are maximized.” What Facebook Deals is offering your bar or restaurant is an opportunity to grow business by extending your reach through social media.

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