The customers that seek out and like your restaurant’s page on Facebook are often your greatest fans. With one like, they are acknowledging your business by agreeing to see all of your updates in their personal news feed. For this reason alone, it’s important to incorporate creative opportunities to interact with your Facebook fans while building your online community.
Move beyond the menu: Many restaurants continually feature menu items with pricing along with pictures of their food. This is a great idea because it reminds your Facebook fans of why they love your establishment so much in the first place. Keep in mind that there are many other facets you can emphasize besides just the food. Does you restaurant have a karaoke night? Trivia night? How can you feature your employees? For instance, if your patrons love a particular bartender at your establishment, you could post a picture of them working and remind your customers that their favorite bartender is on duty that night. (read more…)
When starting a business, it’s vital that every business owner focus on the term “return on investment.” ROI is the ratio of the amount of money earned based on the cost of an initiative, and it helps gauge the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, expansion plans and even personnel changes. To the extent possible, business owners should take the same approach with social media. Here are some suggestions for getting started with thinking about company’s ROI from its social media initiatives.
Calculate costs. Assessing the costs of a social media program is relatively easy. They can be computed simply by using the weekly or monthly salary of the person who handles social media in a company. Or the total cost can be figured out by the number of man-hours it takes for other employees to stay on top of the company’s social media efforts, and then multiplying that number by the appropriate hourly wage. (read more…)
SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.
This week, we asked: Which do you think is more difficult: planning a social media strategy or implementing it? The results:
- Implementing it: 64.62%
- Planning it: 35.38%
Debate about whether it’s tougher to come up with a solid plan or to execute one well is an old, old fight among marketers. Of course, we’d like to have both, but do you need both? Does one matter more than the other? Can great execution save a middling idea? Can a great plan buoy up a cadre of mediocre performers? What is the real value of a plan in an arena with so many variables? Without a plan, could you truly know whether your performance was successful? You could waste an afternoon listening to people make self-righteous arguments for one side or sarcastic take-downs of the other. (read more…)
Facebook Timeline cover photos gave us our first taste of social networking profiles for companies that could visually represent the brand but, more importantly, the personality of a business. Spicing up profiles on most other networks was left to creative descriptions and creative content. Twitter just changed that.
Launched this week, Twitter is starting to look more like Facebook, a move that’s great for brands trying to better showcase themselves on the network. For individual businesses and agencies, this presents several opportunities not to overlook.
- Make your Twitter header image meaningful. More meaningful header images give visitors more knowledge of who and what you represent on Twitter. For nonprofits, this could translate into a switch every month of the photo to highlight an impact you’ve made on the community, with updated photos of projects and outreach programs. Oxfam America is already showing followers one of its missions through its header image.
SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.
This week, we asked: Do you believe that “soft” metrics such as “likes,” comments and follower counts are effective measures of social media performance, and do you personally rely on them? The results:
- No, but I still rely on soft metrics to measure performance: 30%
- No, and I don’t rely on soft metrics to measure performance: 26.88%
- Yes, but I don’t rely on soft metrics to measure performance: 25%
- Yes, and I rely on soft metrics to measure performance: 18.13%
There’s a long-standing debate in social media circles about the usefulness of so-called soft metrics — likes, comments and shares — basically, the stuff that’s really easy to measure. On the one hand, there’s no ambiguity about the number of likes your campaign has. On the other hand, it can be tricky to link these engagements to business outcomes — and remember, only money is money. (read more…)
Twitter
Facebook
Linkedin
RSS
