Category Archives: Face Book Marketing

Facebook Places-What Does It Mean To Your Restaurant?

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Nash Sherchan| 7 Comments

Facebook Places, a new geo-location sharing service, introduced by the social networking site-Facebook allows users to share their location in real-time. The application works over smartphones like iPhone for now (may be on others later) and is simple to use. Users simply scroll through nearby locations and check-in at their current location where ever they frequent. Most of the time people like to check in when they visit to their favorite restaurant. After checking-in, users can also tag all their friends who are also with them at the location and the update shows up on their news feeds.

So why should restaurants care?
Facebook Places also notifies individuals when a friend is nearby or at the same location. It also includes an activity stream of past friends who visited the location. For restaurants, there are a number of possible benefits to Facebook Places. Most obviously, it can stir interest in a restaurant and help increase it exposure to local citizens. Especially for restaurants which specialize in specific niches or more exotic types of cuisines.

The application can also turn a restaurant into a hotspot. The more people check in to the restaurant, the more people decide to meet up with friends there, and so the restaurant increases its chances to increase customer loyalty and keep them coming back for more.Have you ever been to a new place and didn’t know which restaurant to visit? Lets say you didn’t have a time nor any energy to check out on Yelp or any other restaurant directory online. Well after all we are hungry, right ….You are driving in search of restaurant and suddenly you see ton of cars on the parking lot in one of the restaurants among many others. I’m sure you would visit that particular restaurant. Why? Because you got the social proof by looking at the number of people that decided to visit that restaurant as appose to other restaurants. Now imagine a similar situation with Facebook Places. Except now it’s is in the form of digital. Instead of physically driving you are scrolling your facebook app on your iPhone (for now, more on other smart phones later). As you saw the car parked out side the restaurant, you’ll see the digital footprints of some of your own friends and many others. This is powerful. Because you are getting recommendations not only from strangers but your own friends too.I hope you see the power of Facebook Places.

Maybe the most important part of Facebook Places is the Places Page. This page includes all the information on the restaurant, including a map of its locations and the activity stream. By taking ownership of the page, you can merge it with your official business Facebook Page allowing you to share videos, links, photos, events and Facebook ad campaigns. You claim the Facebook Places once and then the rest of the marketing is done by the greatest fans of your restaurant. This is a great example of crowd sourcing. It is the collective power of recommendations by the crowd.

Have you already claimed your Facebook Places for your restaurant business? If not please do so. You’ll be far ahead than those who are hiding their head in the sand as if nothing has changed in the social networking world or who don’t believe in power of social media. Good Luck and please do share your experiences as you are using Facebook Places for your business.

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Why Your Restaurant Should Care About Facebook?

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Nash Sherchan| 6 Comments

Over the past few years I have been closely watching the game played on the web. It’s interesting to watch the race especially between Google and Facebook.

Google has been there for over a decade now. They have been dominating the web since then. But the interesting thing that is happening right now is that Facebook is taking over the web. Facebook comes along in 2004. A baby in front of Google few years ago has grown so big so fast that Google is already starting to feel the heat. In fact Facebook is a threat to their dominance on the web. No wonder Google is scrambling to release product after product like Wave and Buzz just to counter defend themselves. I am not sure how effective they have been.

In the video Thomas Power of ecademy.com presents his insight about Facebook and the future.It is intriguing. I agree with him that  Facebook will take over Google as a number one site on the web by this year 2010. He makes a prediction that Facebook might have a BILLION users by 2012. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook grows that big with the growth rate that I see at present. So for any businesses including restaurants it is the best time to get in and take advantage of the opportunity it offers.

They are so good at taking a simple concept and delivering it to the masses that it has become so popular and thus powerful force on the web. Just take an example of Fan Page. When it just got started it was static. Once they realized that it has to be more interactive, they made the status updates on Fan Page appear on personal profile page of the fan. Now look at all the businesses and may be even your restaurant has adopted Facebook simply because of this reason.

The biggest advantage that I see for your restaurant is the friend to friend recommendation of your restaurant on Facebook. We all know when we want to visit a new restaurant we tend to ask our friends for their recommendation. In a real life scenario you might be able to ask to a very few friends in person or on the phone. But the problem with this method is that recommendation is limited, as you can ask only few people. But with Facebook at a click you have an access to hundreds and even thousands of friends who might have recommendations for the restaurant that you are intending to visit. It would be like going to a restaurant review site like Yelp. But instead of reading review from random strangers you would be reading reviews from your own friends from your network. I’m sure you would trust your friends than the strangers recommendation. If Facebook buys Yelp or comes up with similar product then restaurants are winners here. Even the small restaurants with no brand name will have a chance to rise to the top just based on the good recommendations of your customers who are fans of your restaurant. So please treat your customers right and start gaining the great testimonials from now. Your restaurant will be far ahead when Facebook will integrate product something like that.

The race between Google and Facebook is not complete yet. It is still on. But as a restaurant entrepreneur I think you should be able to figure out who is going to be a winner and try to incorporate your present and future restaurant marketing based on that analysis.

So do you know who is going to be the winner. Who do you think is going to win the race?

As Thomas Power said that the winner of the race is the one with all the names. You know who has all the names now including your name and probably thousands of your customers name.

Your answer might give you a reason why your restaurant should really care about Facebook?

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Are Restaurants prepared to take Advantage of the Marketing Opportunities that Facebook offers?

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment
Link to the whole slideshare presentation (Source-O’Reilly Media)
http://www.slideshare.net/oreillymedia/active-facebook-users-by-country-region-august-2009
Source:
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
Statistics
Company Figures

* More than 350 million active users
* 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
* More than 35 million users update their status each day
* More than 55 million status updates posted each day
* More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
* More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
* More than 3.5 million events created each month
* More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
* More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
* Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Average User Figures

* Average user has 130 friends on the site
* Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
* Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
* Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
* Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
* Average user becomes a fan of 2 Pages each month
* Average user is invited to 3 events per month
* Average user is a member of 12 groups

International Growth

* More than 70 translations available on the site
* About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
* Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Platform

* More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
* Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
* More than 500,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
* More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users
* More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
* More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month
* Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect

Mobile

* There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
* People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
* There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Active Users growth in US.

Today it is exactly one year when I first wrote a blog post about Facebook Marketing. It has been a great blogging journey and I’m enjoying the process. It’s a great feeling just to flash back and see how far I’ve come in my learning process.

When I went through some of my blog post that I had written a year ago to compare the statistics, I  realized how fast Facebook has grown in just one year in front of my eyes. It’s an incredible experience to see how Facebook has transformed especially in the year 2009.

The first thing that is astounding is the growth rate of Facebook in US.It has almost tripled the total number of Facebook users in US. When I checked the stats last year, the total number of users were a little over 36 million.

Look at the above graph by O’Reilly Media, it indicates that the total number of the Facebook users on August of 2009, was 8o million. Today when I checked on Facebook, found out that it has about little over 100 million users in US. So just between August and December of 2009 in four months Facebook has added 20 million users.In one year in 2009 alone Facebook has added over 64 million users. That is huge growth. I predict this will keep growing in the the years ahead not just in States but worldwide.

Do you think your customers are not on Facebook?

Most of your customers are already on Facebook. Ask some of your current customers who frequent your restaurant and you will find out the answer. If not all of your customers are on Facebook right now, they will soon be joining in the future. Hope the graph of users growth trend give you an idea where Facebook is heading.

When we think about social networking site like Facebook, we generally have a perception that it is only for high school kids and not for adults. Well, that might be true in the beginning when Facebook just started, limited only to colleges and high schools. But today as it has grown beyond that age limit of high school kids. In fact the fastest growing segment on Facebook are the parents of  those kids. It is said that mums and dads have out numbered the high school kids. You can see on the above research slide that shows the strongest growth is in 45+ age group.

These mums and dads have the purchasing power and are the decision makers. So don’t you think it would be smart idea to connect with them on Facebook and attract them to your business. I see a lot of potential customers for your restaurant readily available on Facebook. Now your job as a smart restaurant business owner is to first locate them and attract them into your restaurant via Fan Page.

With all these benefits of being able to market your restaurant at a very low cost and with laser target precision, it would be a mistake not to integrate Facebook Marketing if your restaurant wants to thrive in this new age of  Social Media.

After looking at all those statistics and growth trends of Facebook, What do you think about using Facebook for your restaurant marketing? Do you believe Facebook will grow even faster next year? Are restaurants prepared to take advantage of the marketing opportunities that Facebook offers?

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5 Lessons Your Restaurant Can Learn from a True Story of The “Coca-Cola” Fan Page on Facebook.

Posted on December 9, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| 4 Comments

I had heard the story about Coca-Cola Fan Page but never had a chance to see the video.
With less time and more videos on Youtube only the best one gets my attention. As I was browsing Youtube, I came across this video. I would not have bothered to watch it if it was not the title that got my attention. The title was The “Coca-Cola” Fan Page on FACEBOOK. (A True Story).

Since I am writing blog posts about Facebook I thought there might be something that I can
learn from those two creators of Coca-Cola Facebook Fan Page.After all it is about one
of the BIG brand Coca-Cola that is very successful on Facebook.

The interesting thing about this story is that Coca-Cola Fan Page on Facebook was created not because the company asked them to create one for them.The act of creating Fan Page by two creators – Dusty and Michael J was purely based on their interest and passion over their favorite drink Coke. Facebook was kind of new then at least to the corporate world that was getting popular, penetrating into the main stream.You can watch their full story with visual effect giving us the sense of what it looked like when they just got started. It is funny and inspirational at the same time. As you can see and hear from them that when they tried to find the fan page for Coke they didn’t see any that really looked official. So they decided to create
one themselves. Today Coca-Cola is one brand that has one of the most successful Fan Page on Facebook that is maintained by not some marketing agency but real die hard fans. I want to point out the difference
between a Fan Page run by some marketing agency and real fans. Commercial Marketing Agency might not
have as much passion as the real fans. In your case you are the real fan that represents your restaurant on Facebook. Also they might not have in depth knowledge about the product or
customers to really connect with them. Coke was smart enough to figure out this. So instead of going
with a high end marketing agency to create their Fan Page, they decided to have the two real fans to
take care of their Fan Page.

After watching this inspirational video about Coca-Cola Fan page created by these two simple guys
Dusty and Michael J there are certain valuable lessons that any one can learn. Hopefully these lessons
will help you get started on creating your own Facebook Fan Page for your restaurant if you have not
created one. For those who have already created one, hope it will inspire you to work even harder to attract and engage more fans to your fan page.

Here are the following 5 lessons that I learnt and hope your restaurant can learn too.

1. Start and you will discover the possibilities
2. Passion is the driving force that will keep you going to build a remarkable restaurant and Fan Page
3. Have Patience. Success doesn’t come overnight
4. Power of Facebook
5. The art of telling a story

Start and you will discover the possibilities

First thing is that one has to START. Even if creating Fan Page of your restaurant on Facebook
seems hard or simply if you think social media is too much to keep up with apart from operating
your restaurant, you have to start the journey of marketing your restaurant in social media somewhere.
As you can see on the video both the creator never knew in the beginning, where creating a fan page would
take them to. Now you know where they are. Obviosly it is not going to be easy but also not that hard if
you keep on doing something and learn new facebook marketing ideas every day.

Passion is the driving force that will keep you going to build a remarkable restaurant and Fan Page

Another important aspect of making your restaurant marketing success is to have a passion for your business. If you don’t love
what you do, then probably creating a fan page is not for you. Because your updates and activities
are clearly visible on your Fan Page. It is an extension of who you are and what your restaurant represents.
You have to love food and people in order to succeed.Like Dusty and Michael J the creator of Coke Fan Page
you have to be passionate about your product, what you represent and love..love..love..(did I stress enough) what you do.

Have Patience. Success doesn’t come overnight.

Another important thing you require is patience. Nothing happens over night. You will have to win hearts and minds of your fans one at a time. Even for Dusty and Michael J it didn’t happen right away. They just kept on
doing different things attracting and engaging them to finally reach thousands and may be a million of fans before Coca-Cola called
them to Atlanta.One thing I have noticed on Facebook is that there are so many Fan Pages created by restaurant owners but they sit idle on Facebook. You need to be patient and try several strategies to get to the point where your fans themselves will start promoting your restaurant. So please have patience, you will get there of course with hard work.

Power of Facebook

In just over two years or so they have over 4 millions fans. This is huge. You might argue that their fan page is backed by Coca-Cola.To begin with they were not. Even with out the backing of Coke they were able to attract several thousands of fans with very few resources than Coke. So what it proves is that if you really combine your passion with creativity it doesn’t require huge marketing budgets to make this happen.This is the power of Facebook if you can harness it’s potential.

The art of telling a story

As kids we have grown to learn by listening to stories. I can still remember the stories my high school teachers told us back when I was in school. It is that powerful. When you as a small restaurant have limited resources and money you have to tell your story hopefully a compelling one to the world.Tell your story to the world if your restaurant business is involved in a local community charity that helps poor people get education to alleviate from poverty, or if your restaurant cares about environment and use environmentally friendly materials in the restaurant or any thing that is remarkable about your restaurant that is worth making a remark about. People who really cares about
those issue will be attracted to your restaurant. I can tell you now for sure that you will make one of the best friendship with these group of people and consequently also loyal customers for years to come.

There are several other things that one can learn from this one simple video. I just presented the main ones that I felt are important. If you see some other please feel free to share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment. May be some readers might get some new ideas or learn something new and get started on Social Media using Facebook and many others. I would highly appreciate your comments.Thanks.

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How to Make a Facebook Landing Page for your Restaurant?

Posted on December 8, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

What is Landing Page?

Landing Page is basically a page that your new potential fans will see when they visit the fan page of your restaurant on Facebook.It is sort of introductory page where you direct your new fans to and  persuade them to become fans.

Why you should have Facebook Landing Page?

When a new potential fans come to your fan page, you don’t want them to get so confused that they leave right away with out becoming a fan. If it takes them to the main wall with many tabs and other things in one place your potential fans might not know what action to take next. So the main purpose of the landing page must be be a focused one. It should provide clear and concise call to action.You can put any information about your restaurant.  It can be an introduction about your restaurant business, an opt in for eMail Loyalty Club, anything relevant to your restaurant and more importantly Call to Action to Become a Fan.

Video Tutorial for Visual Learner

For all those visual learners I have included the video tutorial prepared by Pat Flynn. The video explains in detail and shows you step by step how to make a Facebook Landing page. Please watch the video to get an idea and then follow the steps that I have outlined below.

Steps for Creating Your Facebook Landing Page?

  1. Create a Facebook Fan Page
  2. Install Application-Static FBML
  3. Have website designer  create HTML
  4. 2 ways to see the landing page for customers.

Create a Facebook Fan Page-

Obviously the first step before you create your landing page is to create a Fan Page. If you haven’t created one, then here is a link on how to create a Facebook Fan Page for your restaurant.

Install Application-Static FBML

First go to the home page of your fan page. On the left hand side below the logo of your restaurant, Click  “Edit Page” and scroll down for more application. Browse for more and on a search box type in Static fbml and it should bring you with fbml app. FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language. You don’t have to worry about this fancy term. But you should be aware of what it does so you understand how it functions when you use it.

Click on Static FBML and then click again on Add to my page that is just below the app icon. Then select the Fan Page where you want this FBML to be activated. In your case it would be the fan page of your restaurant. So select that one. If you have multiple fan pages for multiple restaurants then select the respective restaurant that you plan to include the landing page. Now go back to home page of your fan page. Click Edit and then look for Application FBML. Click the little pencil looking icon and then click Edit. It is going to ask you the Box Title. This is where you put the title that you want it to appear on the tab. You can give any name you find it relevant with your restaurant. I would say something like Welcome.

Have website designer  create HTML

Then you have a bigger empty looking box which is for fbml code or html. Since you are restaurateur and not a website designer I don’t expect you to learn all the technological thing. What I would recommend you to do is have a website designer design the attractive landing page for you and get the html code from them. You will have to pay a small fee but will save you the time and hassle. Now all you have to do then is copy and paste it in the box. Click Save Changes. Once you save it, the landing page should be ready.Go back to the Fan Page. Your new tab that you created might not be visible.To make it appear you have to click the double arrow icon that you see on the far right and click the Welcome landing page that you created. Now you should be able to see the landing page. Make sure that the landing page has 2 important aspects of an effective fan page. One to include Call to Action-Become a Fan in the beginning and end. Two to explain about your restaurant and the benefit of joining your fan page.

2 ways to see the landing page for customers.

Now that you have created your landing page you need to set landing page so that your new potential fans can view it before they decide  to join your fan page. The first way is to go to the main fan page. Click Edit.Scroll to Application and click the pencil looking icon, then Link to this tab. This will create specific link. You can use url shortner like http://bit.ly and use the link to promote it on Twitter or on your website if you have one.

The second method is to allow the first time potential fans to land on the landing page so the chance of them becoming a fan is greater. First you need to go to the main fan page. Go to the status area where you make the updates. Under Options you will see settings. It will take you to View Settings. On the second, where it says “Default Landing Tab for Everyone else” Select Welcome page that you had just created or whatever name you had given to your landing page. And that’s it. You have created a Facebook Landing Page for you restaurant. Congratulation.

Do you think incorporating a nice compelling landing page will help convert more potential fans into real fans? Please share your thoughts and experiences with the results you have got with your landing page on Facebook.Thanks.

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Facebook Search-How To Find Customers For Your Restaurant Using Search Feature on Facebook?

Posted on December 7, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

What is Facebook Search ?

Facebook Search is feature on Facebook that allows any one to make queries     about any thing and get the answer based on the status updates made by your friends or all other Facebook users outside of your Facebook friends network who have opted to make their updates public for any one to view.

It  gives you an overall glance into the conversations or any updates made by your friends who might be looking for your type of restaurants or Live Jazz music that the band might be playing at your restaurant.To use this you type your query in the search box and select “Posts by Friends”.

There is also other option “Posts by Everyone”, which gives you a broad view of all the conversations and updates that are made by those who you don’t even know. I believe this is a huge advantage for you as a restaurant operator. You have some valuable information right infront of you which you can analyze it and make some smart decisions to grow your restaurant business.

Why Facebook Search Feature will be more important in the future?

Facebook recently introduced this search feature. So this is fairly new. Very few restaurants are using this features to their advantage. While it is new and no body is using this in your area, why don’t you jump into this and try to get all those Facebook users who might be potential customers. If you go and get them first before your competitor, you will win in this new race of social media marketing.Hope fully you will make friends and provide them delicious food with great service and turn them to loyal customers for years to come.

There are several  people on Facebook who have set their private settings to public. In essence they have made their decision to make their updates and conversation to be viewed by any one in the world. I predict that more people will be open and make their updates public in the future.This is the goal of Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview that he wants to make the world as open as possible. More and more people as they get used to social networking site like Facebook, they will for sure make their updates public.

Though the food review sites are popular now, I see that the trend of looking the reviews of restaurants on Facebook will grow. WHY?

Because when I go to review sites there are reviews but the problem is that I don’t know them. They might be fake reviews which could be even paid for. The level of trust is not that high with that kind of recommendation. Where as when the name of the restaurant is mentioned on the updates on Facebook by your own friends then you trust your friends than the strangers at those restaurant review sites. I would chose to take the recommendation of my friends. I’m sure you or any one would do the same.

Imagine a friend of yours from England came to your city New york. He wants to visit an Italian restaurant.He doesn’t know which restaurant to visit. He then takes out his iPhone and use the Facebook search to see if his friends have any recommendation. Since he has several New York friends including you chances are that they have bragged about their favorite restaurants. His query gives him some of the finest Italian restaurants that his couple of friends have visited already that month. He would definitely go to that restaurant that his friends on Facebook had recommended rather than an unknown restaurant that he has no clue about.This is a new trend that I predict will grow. I want you to make all the strategic marketing moves to take advantage of this new way of getting discovered on Facebook.

Advantages of using Facebook Search Feature?

  1. Locate potential local customers.
  2. Monitor your brand on Facebook

Locate potential local customers.

Facebook Search feature will help you to locate local customers who might be looking for your restaurant or catering service. Sometimes it can be even customers from different State or country who are coming to your city for business or pleasure.  When I typed in “restaurant in Atlanta” there appeared one update which said “craving for Greek Food”. Now if your restaurant served a Greek Food, you had a great chance to offer her an  incentive to try out even if she had never dined in your restaurant before. This is just one example of how you can locate your potential customers.

Monitor your restaurant’s brand on Facebook

It is also a great tool to monitor your restaurant’s reputation by  gazing at the conversations of your friends and others who are not in your Facebook friends network and who have made their status public available to the entire world.  Let’s say if your friends in Facebook network or outside of it made a comment-good or bad about your restaurant, then you would have an access to these conversations. If it was a good comment then you would thank him or her. Hoping to see them again soon. If the comments were complains about the food or service then you would be right on top of the problem and try to solve it as soon as possible. By knowing what went wrong with the food or service you would have a chance to correct it right then and there. This would avoid the problem to escalate and be a negative buzz for your restaurant. Instead you could turn this negative into positive by making those customers happy again. This would lead a great impression with the customers who would be surprised by the instant customer service. That might lead him to share the incident with his friends. But this time your restaurant would be viewed positively by him and his friends for being proactive and taking care of them. This might lead to friending on Facebook even if you had never been friends before.You never know.

What do you think about this new trend that people will be using Facebook Search more in the future to find out the restaurant they want to visit? Do you think restaurants are really using this Facebook Search feature effectively? Do you know some other benefits of using Facebook Search? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment. Thanks!

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How To Create Your First Facebook Ad and Promote Your Restaurant Facebook Fan Page?

Posted on December 2, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| 2 Comments

In my previous blog post I showed you how to create a Fan Page for your restaurant. Hope by now you have created it for your restaurant on Facebook. If you haven’t I would highly recommend you to create one today. It is FREE and can be created in under 10 minutes. So why don’t we take advantage of this Free resource we have right in front of us. If you haven’t created a fan page for your restaurant yet, here is the link that shows you how to create one.

For those who have created Fan Page for your restaurant, I want to congratulate you for taking action. All it matters is to START. Once you start you begin to see so many opportunities that Facebook offers to small restaurants like yours. The possibilities are endless.

Now that we created the Fan Page, you need to promote your restaurant to potential fans that might live near to your restaurant, may be in 5-10 miles radius. Imagine this process like building a new restaurant. Once you build the restaurant you have to attract new customers in your brand new restaurant. I’m sure you remember that it was much harder in the beginning to advertise, do the marketing to attract new customers into your restaurant. I bet you had spent few extra money to do extra promotions,flyers and local ads just to get your name out in the market. This is the nature of business when it’s new. To promote anything new it takes time, effort and little extra money to get the ball rolling.

Now let’s use the same analogy for our restaurant Facebook Fan page and understand that in order to attract potential fans to your new fan page you need to do extra promotion, ads even if we have to spend little extra money. But the amount we spend on Facebook ad is very less in comparison to other traditional advertising platform. So it is well worth spending that extra cash to gain new customers especially when you are trying to get that momentum. Typically to gain a new customer restaurants spend almost $6-7 or may be more using traditional lead generation tactics. But using Facebook Ad, you can attract new fan which is going to be your customer eventually at merely 52-59 cents. That is a drop out of an ocean. I recommend using Facebook Ad because it gives that extra boost when your fan page is new and require few fans ( at least 100) in the beginning to get the ball rolling. You can also request your friends and family members to join your restaurant’s Fan Page on Facebook. That way it looks like that something is happening in your new fan page. When potential fans arrive at your fan page on Facebook it will encourage them to join.

Make sure you have good looking pictures of your restaurant, photos of finger lickingly good signature dishes of your menu. If you have funny videos of your restaurant or employees just include them too. It just shows how cool and fun it is to be part of your restaurant. It will build that rapport with new potential fans and more likely that they will join.

When you build a large base of fans there is “update” feature that will essentially allow you to send updates to all your fans about any promotions that you want to do. It could be wine tasting session or happy hour or anything related to your restaurant. Though statistics shows that most of the Facebook fans don’t look at these updates, you can always educate your fans and take advantage of this feature which is like email to notify your fans about any updates of your restaurant. It is available at your disposal for FREE. So you might wanna look into this too if want to make use of the update feature.

For those visual learner I have included the video prepared by Mathew Loop. The steps shown on the video is applicable for any businesses including restaurants. Please go through the video, get an idea and then follow the steps that I have outlined below.

3 Steps to create Facebook Ad for your restaurant on Facebook.

  1. Design your Ad
  2. Targeting
  3. Campaigns and Pricing
Facebook Ad

First go to the bottom of the page and click Advertising. Click “Create an Ad” button. It will take you the similar page that you see above. There are 3 steps to complete this Facebook Ad.

Step 1- Design your Ad

You can design your ad for external website outside of Facebook or you can do it for the fan page of your restaurant within the Facebook. Since you are going  to promote your own restaurant’s fan page, select “I want to advertise something that I have on Facebook”. It will then populate the selection box with the fan page of your restaurant. Now the title is going to be automatically be the same as the name of your fan page. It is better if you choose your fan page name with the restaurant name followed by the city. It just gives extra clarity to the fans and also it is easily indexed by search engine like Google. Next thing to do is to write the body text that should be 135 characters. So be creative to put the most important call to action words. I would say like “Visit our fan page and become a fan for a chance to win a burrito.” or whatever you are promoting. Your strong call of action to the new fans is to become a fan. You have to give a reason to be a fan of your restaurant. When you say for a chance to win a burrito or your popular item in the menu, you are persuading new fans and giving them a reason to be a fan. The key is to be creative and come up with an incentive to persuade the potential customers to become a fan of your restaurant on Facebook. If you are not satisfied with the default photo of your restaurant logo, you can change the image by uploading a new photo of any menu item you think is going to attract new fans.

Step 2-Targeting

On the location you can select United States. If your restaurant is other parts of the world select the respective country. Narrow down it to city since your restaurant is local.To get more new fans from the surrounding cities, it is better to include the cities within 5-10 miles radius. If you want to target more customers from wider area please feel free to increase the miles radius as you feel appropriate for your restaurant.For the age you can select from 13 and above to any. If you want to target customers on their birthday you can check mark on “target people on their birthdays” For sex you can select male and female. Under keywords choose the words that might describe about your restaurant. For education you can choose all. And the rest you can leave it as default. ( If you discover some good results selecting them, please do share your findings with us) When I targeted the customers from Atlanta within 5-10 miles radius it resulted 32360 potential customers. Now that is huge number of customers if you can attract them to become fans and eventually your real customers that frequent your restaurant.

Step 3-Campaigns and Pricing:

The step 3 is to create your campaign and bid your pricing. Since you will be creating a new campaign choose “create a new campaign“. Then give a name to the campaign.Choose some catchy headline. Create your daily budget spending for your campaign ad. This is where you control how much you are willing to spend per day for your campaign ad. You can be within the buget $10 or $20 or any amount you wish. Select the schedule when you want to run your ad. You can run the ad continuously starting the very same day when Facebook approves it or you can choose to run your ad only on specified dates.  Select “Pay for Clicks (CPC)” instead of “Pay for Impressions (CPM)” as you will have to pay only when fans take an action by clicking on the ad. So you have more chance of gaining fans this way.Your bid could be between the range of 0.52-0.76 US dollar. It may vary sometimes but it should be less than a dollar which is a good bargain for ad.

Lastly you press the button Create.Your Facebook Ad will be in pending for Facebook to approve. Provided you have done everything right it should be approved within 24 hours and your campaign ad should start working for you and attract some new fans.

Keep monitoring the conversion if any potential fans are really becoming fans of your restaurant. If you are getting result by acquiring new fans then you have hit the nail on the head. If not then tweak your ads until you start getting the desired result.

I hope this will give you a head start in gaining the momentum while promoting your restaurant’s  brand new fan page on Facebook. If you get good results or discover  something new about Facebook Ad while experimenting with it, I’d appreciate if you could share with us by leaving some comments. I’m sure all of our restaurant friends would be thankful for your input and ideas.Hope we all can help each other by sharing information and knowledge to effectively promote our restaurants on Facebook. Good Luck with your Facebook Ad Campaign.

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4 Restaurant Marketing Strategies To Attract More Fans On Facebook And Convert Them Into Loyal Customers.

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| 4 Comments

With over 350 million users world wide by now Facebook is the most popular social media site in the world. All of my friends are on Facebook. Most of my communications from email and phone have migrated to Facebook. We all hangout on Facebook to share information and updates about our personal lives. Over 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day as per the last stats on over all time spent on Facebook. Facebook has become a cyber destination for people to get updated with their friends and families.  Now what does this all mean to your restaurant?

Facebook in a way is blessing to small restaurants like yours. It offers a huge opportunity to market your restaurant for FREE except it requires little bit of your social time. It has leveled the field plain in regards to marketing.It means that no more can a BIG company win just because they have more money than you. The game of marketing today, in an age of social media is dictated not just by the amount of dollars one can throw at mass media company rather by creative ideas and innovation. In fact if you are smart and learn the ins and out of social media marketing you can outsmart the BIG brands who may try to outspend in the hope to crush you.

Some times it makes me think if at all now you need a traditional static website where there is no way of communicating with your customers directly as you can do on Facebook. Knowing how busy you are in your restaurants I don’t expect you to learn html for just creating website which sits idle in a cyberspace. However,I’d not hesitate to recommend a blog for you restaurant knowing how well it get indexed on blogs and can help your restaurant to be organically found on search engine like Google. I would recommend only if you have time and extra money to invest so you can post menus updates, recipe, any customers’ experiences or anything relevant to your restaurant. But if you think you don’t have that much time, you can start of your online presence by creating your personal profile and also Fan Page of your restaurant on Facebook. I believe if you just do this for now, you would be far ahead than other restaurants who are scratching their head to figure out this social media jungle. My recommendation is that you start the journey of social media marketing step by step. First Facebook, then Twitter, then may be blog and so on…. The key is to master on one and migrate to another. That way you are maximizing your result for the time you input. You don’t want to be in a situation where you are spread out thin in millions of social media sites, loosing the focus and getting no results at all.

Now that we know that Facebook can be helpful for small businesses like restaurants, the question is how can you leverage Facebook to attract more customers into your restaurant and potentially make more money for your restaurant?

Check out the video above created by “Your Business Channel” that shares the Facebook marketing strategies for businesses. However I have incorporated the strategies along with some other additional relevant ideas that is related to restaurant business.

Below are the four Facebook marketing strategies that you can implement for your restaurant.

  1. Get lots of friends-(Magic number is 5000)
  2. Create a Fan Page and use branded customized application
  3. Publish interesting contents
  4. Look for right partners

1.Get lots of friends

I hope you have already created your personal profile by signing up at facebook. If not I would highly recommend you to create one right now at http://www.facebook.com/   It will take you less than 10 minutes and it is FREE.Now the key is to request friends to your list and the magic number is 5000. You goal is to get that 5000 friends in your friend list. Now you are not going to request all in one time. But you can start by requesting 10 or 15 friends per day or whatever you think is appropriate in your situation. But I want to WARN you not to over do it. Facebook won’t like it and it will alert them as if you are spamming and won’t allow you to request any more friends. So go easy on that. Another important thing to keep in mind is to request friends by qualifying them focusing more on quality rather than quantity. What I mean is that you want to friend those people who might be your potential customers.  To begin with you could simply ask to your current customers that come to your restaurant. Most of them are already on Facebook. Once you become friends with them. Look into their friend list. Local friends have local friends on their friends list. Chances are that they might have categorized as local friends or real friends or something like that. You could just request friends by just writing  a small friendly note. It is like meeting friends of your close buddy at a party and introducing to yourself. If you do it correctly, chances are most of them will accept to be friends with you especially when you mention the friend’s name with personal note of yours. If you feel uncomfortable then there is feature where Facebook will automatically suggest you friends based on your friends social networks. It is doing pretty much the same thing except now the computer robots are doing the recommending. Facebook is acting as a friend who is trying to introduce you to a friend of a friend. So my logic is if Facebook is doing why not you do it more proactively and gain more friends faster. After all we join social network sites like Facebook to make more friends some known and  some unknown.

Alternatively you could also look into foodie group that is created on Facebook in your city.You can participate on some of those group that you like and make some friends there too. Imagine if you had 5000 friends that were potential customers of your restaurant. That means you have an access to your friends/customers at a click of mouse or touch of an update on your smart phone. You will never have to be at the mercy of those newspaper, radio or TV execs. No more will they control the marketing message of your restaurant. You will control the message yourself. Most importantly with out having to pay that hefty advertising fee and that never seems to work for your restaurant.

2. Create a Fan Page and use branded customized application

Once you create your own personal profile page on Facebook and get bunch of friends to start off, you can start building your fan page using branded customized application. If you haven’t yet created the fan page of your restaurant, here is the link on how to create a Facebook Fan Page for your restaurant.Though some of the big brands have made their own customized application from scratch costing them several thousands of dollars, you as a small restaurant with tight budgets, it might not be worth your money. However you can  use other Facebook application built by other app developers  by paying tiny subscription fees. This way you don’t have to invest a lot in one single app.Rather you have a chance to try several other apps that might fit to your restaurant needs. Some of the popular Facebook app providers are Involver, WildFire, Sprout Publisher . I would recommend you to choose some apps that would enhance your user’s experience on fan page. Your users are the fans of your restaurant. The key thing is that the app should make your fan page so attractive that it should make them come back again and again to the Fan Page. May be you could use app to distribute the coupons. May be update your tweets if your restaurant has twitter presence, or update your blog post. (I’m suggesting this if you are already on twitter or blogging)

3. Publish interesting contents

Update your Facebook Fan page at least once a day. Though there is no set rules on how many times a day you can update your fan page, the frequency is important with the relevancy of your updates. The best scenario would be 2 times a day. One right before lunch at around 11am and the other before dinner time say at around 5-6 o’ clock. These time slots are important because those are the times when people tend to check their Facebook right before they leave their office.You have two objective here by choosing this time. Your restaurant has a chance to get exposed to the most number of people by sharing whatever information you are trying to get in front of them. Secondly even if you were just sharing a general info lets say a great article on NY times about healthy living, you are indirectly reminding them about your restaurant. It is an indirect sell. You do not appear pushy rather informative and yet very subtle at selling your brand. May be that simple informative update will remind that person to get the dinner that his wife might have requested him for but he had forgotten it. You also may decide some other times as needs arise. It is totally up to you and try at different times just to test and see the results for yourself.

You should decorate your fan page with beautiful looking photos of signature dishes from your menu or some funny videos of some of your employees or yourself if you have one. It just makes the fan page more interactive. Fans tend to enjoy them since they have more visual effect. They seem to be more connected when they can see a chef showing his ninja style acrobatic skills. When customers see a funny video of a server who served them,  they feel the sense of belonging to that group. Even for  fans who have never visited the restaurant it would create a kind of bonding with your restaurant. It would create an image of cool restaurant in the mind of any fans that would come and see all those funny videos.While making the facebook update don’t be too structured and appear too corporate. Fans on Facebook are like friends so present to them casually as you would with friends. May be sometime creating jokes or being sensational like of tabloids. Do something different and unique and never be boring.

4. Look for right partners

You should work with others who have the same target customers like yours. You can just go around in your neighborhood and locate some other businesses in different market. Let’s say there is a health club. You could make friends with these business owners first. Chances are that they might have also built their fan base on Facebook. You could make a friendly business deal to promote each others business on Facebook. Wherever appropriate you could refer respective product to each others database of customers. When you are doing a joint marketing that would compliment each others business, both of you could also share the marketing cost. This way you could do grand marketing with less marketing expense to bear and yet impacting all the businesses involved in the marketing campaign. This joint marketing campaign can go beyond 2 businesses to any number of businesses. The more businesses you have participating the better it is.This is more effective when all the businesses decide to do offline marketing that is integrated with the online marketing that could be on Facebook.

Hope these ideas will help you get started  to effectively market your restaurant on Facebook attracting tons of fans and hopefully turning them into loyal customers of your restaurant for years to come.Please share this with your friends who might benefit from these strategies. I would also appreciate if you could drop some comments on what you think about the above Facebook strategies  and add some more ideas if you have that would help restaurants use Facebook more effectively.Thanks.

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Posted in Face Book Marketing, iPhone Marketing

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How to create a Facebook Fan Page for your Restaurant?

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| 17 Comments

Facebook is no doubt the most popular social networking site in the world with over 300 million users by now. Restaurant businesses can not afford not to care about Facebook and make it a part of it’s marketing strategy if it really wants to win in this new age of social media we are entering into. Lots of big brand chain restaurants like McDonald’s, Chick-Fil-A, Pizzahut and many others have started building a great brand with millions of fans. But I have yet to see small restaurants take advantage of marketing opportunity that Facebook offers. I will try to explain how to set up a Facebook Fan Page for your restaurant step by step.

VIDEO- For those who are more visual learner I have included the tutorial video prepared by Matthew Loop. Though the video shows the steps how to create Facebook Fan Page with the example of his Chiropractor Service, it is applicable to any businesses including restaurants. So please feel free to watch the video to get a visual idea on different steps. However once you watch the video and get an idea please follow the steps below that I have written. That way it is easier for you and not confusing while you are creating your Facebook Fan Page for your restaurant.

Step 1. Login to your Facebook

You can create your Facebook Fan Page for your restaurant though your personal Facebook account. So the first thing you have to do is login  to your Facebook. Input your username and password and log in.

Step 2. Locate Advertising section on the very bottom.

Once you login to your Facebook account, scroll down to the very bottom and you will see a link that says “Advertising”. Click the link and it will take you to the landing page of Advertising. You will also see an orange color flag icon left to “Pages”. Now Click again the Pages option. It will then take you to the Facebook Pages section. To the far right you will see a green button that says “Create a Page”. Click the green button. It will then take you the actual page where you can start building the Fan Page.

Step 3-Create your Facebook Fan Page

While creating a new Facebook Page, it will prompt you to select the category. Select Local and then “Restaurant” as your sub category. Then it will ask you the name of the restaurant. Input the name of your restaurant. Be careful with this one. Once you choose the name you can not change. Also it is search engine indexed. So you have to make sure you choose the right words so your restaurant can be found while potential customers do a search on Google or Facebook itself. So I would recommend to put the name of your city or town after the name.That way you are narrowing your name for the people to find it easily. Check mark the box as an authorized person to create the page. Input your full name as an electronic signature. Then click Create Page button. There you go your Facebook Fan Page for your restaurant is created.

Step 4- Edit the information and upload the logo.

Now that your Fan Page is created you have to input all the information regarding your restaurant and also upload the logo or picture of your restaurant to give it a good looking. So when fans come to your fan page they feel comfortable. It is like your digital home. If it is decorated  beautifully fans tend to like it. So invest some time to make it look beautiful and professional. Fill out all the detail information of your restaurant from address, opening hours, to contact information or any that is relevant to your restaurant. If you have your website or twitter account you can also display it on the left hand side below the logo. I would advise you to put something that would encourage your fans to recommend their friends to join your Fan Page.May be you could provide incentives like Free Meals for the Lucky Fan every week. Or any other that you can think of. Remember we are trying to leverage fans to bring in more fans.

Step 5. Publish your Page.

Your Fan page is not live until you click that last “Publish this Page” link. Once  it is LIVE, become the first fan of your own Restaurant.

Now your Facebook Fan Page for your restaurant is live and can be searched and found on Facebook.Congratulation you did it!

Once you create your Fan Page please share your experience about creating and promoting your Fan Page. Should you have any other questions regarding Fan Page please feel free to ask me via comments. Also tune in to my next blog post that will be related to Facebook Fan Page on how to attract more Fans.

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Posted in Face Book Marketing

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Starbucks VIA instant taste Challenge Day- Brilliant Marketing Strategy on Social Media by Starbucks.

Posted on October 5, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| 2 Comments

How Starbucks attracted me into the Sales funnel and finally into their Store persuading me to buy their VIA instant coffee.

Starbucks VIA Instant coffee was the buzz last week every where from radio to Facebook, Twitter and every possible medias. I have to admit that I am impressed by their social media marketing strategy funneling a potential customer into buying the VIA instant coffee. Despite being a marketing guy and knowing how they were attracting me to their fish net, I was persuaded to finally buy their VIA instant coffee. Now allow me to share the process how they did it to me so it gives you an idea how a brilliant marketing can work. Please feel free to use some of their ideas for a similar product launch of your restaurant.

On Thursday October 1st I heard the buzz about Starbucks VIA instant coffee on the radio. They were talking so highly about it in a local radio that I even made a Facebook update wondering if it was really that good. What I essentially did was viral marketing for them at a push of an update on my Facebook informing all my friends about their new product VIA instant coffee. That is what I call a word of mouse advertising. It was purely on a voluntary basis. No one forced me to do that. I just did it because I like the coffee and I wanted to share with my friends. As this buzz was lingering in my mind, the next day when I opened Facebook, I saw the ads from Starbucks on my right hand side of the screen enticing me to RSVP. Sure enough I did it.

Now it was Saturday morning yesterday. I woke up and the first thing I wanted was a coffee. I would have gone to Dunkin Donuts or other Coffee place that morning. Since Starbucks was successful in engaging my mind with their new coffee product VIA instant coffee right from the middle of the week, I could not forget it and it just automatically prompted my mind to go to Starbucks yesterday morning.

I went to the Starbucks. Saw their promotional displays and also the sample of VIA instant coffee with two flavors- Columbia and Italian. I tried Columbia right away. Later I went to the cashier to buy a regular coffee but never had a desire to really buy the VIA instant coffee. She explained me in more details about the promotion and that I could buy the VIA instant coffee for $1.50 with $1 OFF on the 3 packets Italian flavor instant coffee.On top of that I would get my grande regular freshly brewed coffee for FREE. Now who would not want to take that offer. That is brilliant to me. Here is why? If that offer was not there then I would not have bought the VIA instant coffee. Their main strategy was to hand over the VIA instant coffee to every customers that walked into the store with the same FREE cup of coffee offer. Though they lost their money on that FREE cup of coffee I think they won in a long run. Now just take an example of me. Just because of that offer I got those VIA instant coffee. Now I will be trying that coffee. I might like it. The chances of me telling to my other friends is more as I enjoy the coffee. The chance of me buying more also increased dramatically. See how with one simple strategy Starbucks got me hooked into their sales funnel.

Starbucks Twitter Marketing Strategy

StarbucksVIA taste Challenge tweet

StarbucksVIA taste Challenge tweet

On Friday at 12:59 pm Starbucks tweeted about their Starbucks taste challenge day promotion with a link to their event link on Facebook. With one tweet Starbucks were able to broadcast their event to over 300 thousands followers. It was FREE. Imagine if they had to broadcast the same message on TV, it would cost them couple of thousands if not millions of dollars. Using twitter platform, it enabled Starbucks to inform about it’s VIA instant coffee product launch to potentially to everyone who ever were interested in Starbucks coffee. Once people got that tweet they were further drawn into Facebook to RSVP the  StarbucksVIA taste challenge day event.This is brilliant because when they RSVP the event then it is directing their mind subconsciously to attend that event. I am the perfect example. Saturday morning as I woke up, my subconscious mind told me to go to Starbucks.

Starbucks Facebook Ad

Starbucks Facebook Ad

Starbucks VIA Taste Challenge

I have seen Starbucks as the leader in leveraging the social media to engage it’s customers making a great brand awareness. For this particular VIA instant taste challenge event they used the Facebook to promote and in my opinion they were successful. As of writing this article there were 211, 1184 confirmed guests already and we still have time till tomorrow-Monday 5th October up to 5pm. Starbucks might have bought Facebook ad for couple of spare change out of their coffee sales. That marketing expense would be like a drop out of the ocean. However the impact it had to attract targeted potential customers was huge. That is the power of Facebook targeted ad. Any restaurants can attract their customers based on their geographic location. Your restaurant pay only when the ad gets clicked. I feel it is better than any other ad as it is targeted specific to your own local area within your own city.

I hope you got an idea how Starbucks has leveraged social media like Facebook and Twitter to attract the potential customers and more importantly how to use some of those ideas into your restaurant business. If you also want to add some ideas that I might have left please feel free to add on the comment section. I would appreciate it and also other restaurants who are trying to figure this new social media thing would also be very thankful to you.

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Posted in Blog Marketing, Face Book Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter Marketing, Viral Video Marketing, Youtube Marketing

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