Increasing Sales through Social Media (Part 1)

We all have been told that Social Media sites and applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the “new frontier” for marketing. In a few short years, the old question of “do you have a website” has been replaced with “do you have a YouTube Channel?”

Unfortunately, few people tell us how to harness the power of social media.This series of blogs is intended to help you determine the parameters of a social media strategy for your restaurant and to make suggestions on how to implement one.

Let’s start at the beginning: finding out what is already being said about your restaurant and listening to any ongoing conversations. People may already be talking about your establishment in the social media space. These conversations can occur on Yelp, Twitter, blogs, and comments to blogs, among other places.

Yelp
Since most restaurant marketing is local in nature, let’s start with Yelp. If you are not going onto Yelp regularly and searching for your brand name, start today. If you see a negative review, take that feedback to heart and then you have a couple of choices. First, you can reach out to that person, send them a message, invite them back and improve on their experience (have them ask to see the manager or yourself when they come in). You will need to set up a Yelp account to send messages to reviewers, but it is quick, easy, and free. Hopefully, you will get a follow up review that is much more positive.

Your other option is to get the review buried on page 8 or 9, so it’s less likely to be seen. For this you would need to encourage diners that have had great experiences to post a review to Yelp. Train your servers to identify parties that are clearly having a great experience and have the server ask them to post a Yelp review. Chances are, someone at the table regularly uses Yelp. Either way, reading the reviews on Yelp is a great place to start.

Google Alerts
Another way to monitor what is being said about you is to set up a Google Alert for your establishment. It’s easy to do. Go to google.com/alerts, enter your search term – which is most likely your restaurant or brand name – set the alerts to “comprehensive,” set the frequency, and enter your email address. When your search terms are mentioned on the internet (or a Google indexed page on the internet), you will receive an email alert with a link to the conversation. If you haven’t already done this, you should do this in the next few days.

Twitter
The first step is again to set up a Twitter account if you do not have one. Once you log into your Twitter account on the right navigation bar you will find a search box. Input the keywords relevant to your restaurant and hit the search button. At the bottom of the navigation bar you will see a link called “RSS feed for this query.” Click that link and on the ensuing page you will see the current tweets for your particular keyword. In the lower left of the box at the top you will see a link that says “Subscribe to this feed.” Click that link and follow the steps if you want to automate the process.

Backtype
Conversations about your restaurant can occur in many places including social media sites, social network sites, blogs and comments to blogs. That is why you probably want to use something like Backtype. Backtype is a free service that indexes literally millions of conversations from blogs, social networks, and social media sites. You can search Backtype from its website (without setting up an account) or you can create an account and set up email alerts when keywords relevant to your restaurant are mentioned in a conversation. As with all these tools, it is better to automate the process and have the information pushed to you rather than having to manually retrieve it.

Taking these first steps will allow you to see what has been said about your restaurant in the recent past and to begin monitoring what will be said in the future. This is a key first step in harnessing the power of social media on behalf of your restaurant.

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