Social media made simple

It takes more than knowing how to prepare the perfect parmigiana or serve the ideal schooner of cold beer to make your venue succeed. Creativity needs to extend beyond the kitchen in connecting with your customers. Using the Internet, particularly social media, can be a cost-effective way to market your venue.

GET LISTED
Firstly, make sure your venue is SEEN online. It is exactly like this: if you don’t have a signboard, which can be seen from the street, people will walk past! So make sure your venue can be searched and reviewed through web portals such as tripadvisor.com, bestrestaurants.com.au, eatability.com.au, totaltravel.com.au, and menulog.com.au. It is important to also feature on local portals such as melbournebars.com.au.
In today’s busy world, people get most of their information online. The way they find you will vary – it could be searching menulog.com.au for a venue for dinner tonight or stumbling on your bistro as an interesting place for lunch while booking a hotel room on totaltravel.com.au.
Make sure they can find your venue via such sites. (Some web portals require payment to list your business, while others offer free listings.)
Decide on the profile of the customers you want to reach and “mix up” the portals your venue is seen on.
Monitor how many people ‘clicked’ to your business from the site where your venue has been listed. This way you will know how much online traffic you are catching. Talk to your webhost, they can easily provide you with all the necessary information and statistics.
Review and change your strategy on a regular basis – online communities can be hot one moment and cold the next.
Make sure your own venue’s website is regularly updated with the current menu, specials and up-coming events.

SOCIAL MEDIA
There is no secret. Our life is about relationships: our family, our friends, and our co-workers. Social media is just a clever name for building relationships online.
MySpace, Facebook, Twitter – all these can help you build relationships with your existing customers and find new ones.
How to do this? Just apply some common sense.
Sharing builds relationships. Share people’s experience in your venue. You can create a strong community feel by publishing photos from events. Patrons can view shots of themselves and their friends or have a “nosy” at an event they missed. Townsville’s Riverview Tavern does this on its Facebook page, which had 1254 fans at last count.
Adelaide’s Governor Hindmarsh Hotel, which won the AHA’s best entertainment venue award nationally this year, also has a Facebook page, with a tally of 2997 friends. Check ‘the wall’ of this venue- they are doing something right!
The important thing to remember is don’t disappoint visitors who return regularly looking for more videos or photos.
Post content that your audience wants to see. A great example: The Sands Tavern in Queensland’s Maroochydore – an entertainment venue – streams live music on its MySpace site.
Another idea could be having your head chef provide a few quick and simple tips or how-tos via video.
A greater level of loyalty is gained when you make a connection with them. If your customers feel like they are a part of your business it will make them want to help promote your venue. If the customer feels connected, he is more likely to refer your establishment to friends and colleagues.
Constantly tempt with your menu updates. While many restaurants in Australia have shied away from actively using Facebook, it’s proven a hit overseas. Crave Restaurants (USA), uses its Facebook page to tempt its 3707 fans with photos of their ‘specials’ dishes with mouth-watering descriptions.
Mekong Restaurant recently posted a new beer it was serving. The post said: “Awesome aroma of caramel, rye, spices (and) bread. The appearance is a very attractive, hazy, reddish orange, off-white head. The flavour is caramel, brown sugar, citrus, rye (and) bread. The finish is beautiful, citrus ‘hoppiness’. The mouth-feel is beautiful.” You can bet its 3,795 fans were thinking about ‘a cold one’ tonight!

THE THINGS TO BE AWARE OF
Each type of social media network caters for different age, social and professional groups so make sure you find the right mix for your venue.
MySpace and Facebook both appeal to people looking to reconnect with old friends and family members or find new friends online. Their varied features include email, instant messaging, and photo and video sharing. Facebook tends to be more geared to adults, while MySpace is generally youth-orientated.
With Facebook, you have the choice of having an individual account or a fan page – what you choose for your venue is up to you. Fan pages have no limit on the amount of friends you can have, while individual accounts have a limit of 5000 friends. Still, Facebook accounts can create a more intimate, community feel, as you have to ask the permission to become ‘friends’ with people, unlike with the fan pages.
Another form of social media is Twitter – a micro-blogging service, which allows people to post succinct messages of up to 140 characters. You can configure Facebook and Twitter, so they can be updated simultaneously when you want to announce something (meaning you don’t have to do the same work twice). Twitter can also be used as a tool to listen to what people are saying online about your venue and converse with them.
Regardless, make sure you keep your Facebook; Twitter or MySpace site updated with fresh content and be involved with the conversations taking place on your public “wall”. Let your customers know you’re listening!

FINAL WORD
Remember in 2009 Facebook had 6,500,000 active users, many of whom will log in several times in a day, because they want to catch up with friends and express their opinions. Social media provides a massive, online meeting place and you can do well to become a part of the mix. After all, what type of marketing could be more cost-effective?
Still unsure? Well, here is another certainty – it doesn’t matter if your venue has a presence or not – people will still discuss, blog and “tweet” about it. So, why not join in the discussion?

BISTRO, May 2010

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