Article
How to Facebook your brand
Tips and tools for restaurant concepts looking to launch a social-media platform.
July 19, 2009 by Valerie Killifer — senior editor, NetWorld Alliance
The world of social media can sometimes be difficult to navigate. From Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn, it can sometimes be difficult to determine which site works best when making consumer-to-brand connections.
While Twitter is still growing as a social-media network, the more established Facebook has an estimated 250 million users, of which an estimated 120 million log on daily. As brands look to take advantage of their social media options, they might find Facebook is a good place to start.
Qdoba Mexican Grill launched its Facebook page in 2008, although the company waited until April of this year to focus on building its Facebook fan base.
What is Facebook? Facebook is a free-access social networking Web site owned by Facebook Inc. Once registered, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people (also known as fans). |
Qdoba's page was created by Doug Thielen, the company's manager of non-traditional marketing and public relations, who also led construction of the company's Facebook strategic plan.
Since April, the company has managed to double its Facebook fan base to 20,477, and uses its Facebook page to run promotions, display images and videos, and give "an insider's guide into Qdoba," Thielen said.
After all, an insider's view into a concept is what many followers are looking to find.
Oxiem social media strategist Billy Fischer said restaurants should offer some type of value a visitor could not get on the company's Web site. For example, Jimmy John's (which has 200K fans) provides an online ordering application through its Facebook page.
"Maybe this is behind the scenes videos, special offers/coupons or interesting contests," he said.
Getting started
Not every fast casual concept has a new media guru such as Thielen on board. For those that don't, company's such as Oxiem provide consulting services designed to help brands launch their social network platform.
Fischer works with corporate and franchise groups on how to leverage social media and said brands no longer look at the platform as an over-hyped trend.
For brand's looking to get started, Fischer offers these tips:
1. Get started as your personal brand. Figure it out a little bit. Before you create a company page, go on as yourself, connect with some people and figure out how it works.
2. Think about some creative strategy. Develope some type of voice strategy. People do not want to be advertised to, but they're willing to connect with the brand if they laugh or something else is offered.
3. Create a vanity URL. Get a vanity URL for your company (it's free) and get it as soon as possible. You can start to put that on advertising and marketing materials. You're going to see company's doing that more and more where they're directing people to their Facebook page. You can also purchase Facebook advertising to specifically target an audience.
4. Integrate the Facebook "Fan Box" widget. In early July, Facebook announced the launch of a "Fan Box" widget that allows brands and businesses to share status updates from their Facebook page - and get new Facebook fans - on any Web site. The Fan Box widget is designed to help convert Web site visitors into Facebook fans.
"What I recommend to corporate brands is they develop a Facebook page and build that page to represent the entire organization," he said. "If they don't, then the franchisees will do it and there will be fragmented components."
However, once a concept understands how to use Facebook, it might encourage franchisees to utilize the page as a way to reach out to its local market.
"Once we launched our site, we put together a social media 101 (template) for our local market people," Thielen said. "I can speak on behalf of Qdoba as the brand, but as the local market, it gives people the opportunity to interact on a micro level. So, we made it very easy for them to take that step."
Thielen describes Facebook as the "hub" of social media activity, a designation supported by recent reports of its popularity. For the month of June, Facebook surpassed Yahoo as the biggest use of Internet surfers' time, taking up an average of four hours, 39 minutes and 33 seconds. And according to AddtoAny, Facebook now dominates sharing, with 24 percent of shares from the widget consisting of users posting items to the social network, which beats out e-mail (11.1 percent) and Twitter (10.8 percent).
"My biggest recommendation to a brand is to have someone help you and advise you with this. The social media space can be very beneficial and very risky," he said. "It's really easy to screw up, so have someone who knows advise you."
Click here for additional how-to Facebook tips.
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