7 Surprising Characteristics of Restaurant Social Media: A Rant and Some Observations

So I wanted to taste something new this week. Not just new food, silly, though I’m always up for that.

No, this week I spent a lot of time reaching out to about three dozen local restaurants talking to them about their digital and social media use. I came away with some surprising notes. I thought a couple of them were worthy of sharing.

Here are a few notable themes from these calls:

1. People are nervous about the economy. This is the first time I’ve encountered this in the past few years. Look, I don’t know much about the intricacies of the economy as a whole. I pretend that I have a decent pulse on things nationally, but all I really have is my own work and the people I talk to. And restaurants are a nice barometer for how things are going in the rest of the world. It’s one of those businesses that people need to survive, but can also live without when times are tough.

So when I hear that restaurant owners are asking for solutions for discounts and coupons, I start to get nervous.

And I sense an opportunity.

Where I live in Central Iowa, this discount phenomenon is a common theme. First, I think there are probably too many restaurants around and with the rise of the themed chain restaurant with their enormous marketing budgets and focus grouped menus, this isn’t going away. What local restaurants are going to face here in the coming months is that they’re going to sense that there isn’t much room for another location.

Yet there is. There almost always is room for another restaurant.

For the restaurant owner ready to contribute in a real and positive way to the ways of new media, there’s always a way. So to these people, I simply offer my solutions as a means of creating more raving fans and building your digital assets in case the economy really turns south.

2. Restaurant owners and managers still don’t trust digital. A real head scratcher here. They see it as a necessary evil. This is troubling. Why? Because as the ads on the platforms get more and more expensive, you’re missing out on what Gary Vaynerchuk calls the “land grab” for digital attention. Here are just a couple stats from Strata.

• Any one of the apps owned by Facebook is used once per day by 1.6 billion people and Facebook has 2 billion monthly users.
• Snapchat has 171 million daily users.
• Instagram has 800 million monthly users.
• LinkedIn has over 300 million monthly users.
• Twitter has 336 million monthly users.
• YouTube will soon take over television.

So trust it or don’t trust it… But don’t pretend that it doesn’t exist or it’s some sort of fad. It’s time to build those digital assets.

“So trust it or don’t trust it… But don’t pretend that it doesn’t exist or it’s some sort of fad. It’s time to build those digital assets.”

3. Review sites are a concern. The number one concern for digital media with restaurateurs continues to be review sites, responding to bad reviews and online reputation. ‪This is fair, but in my experience that doesn’t mean you should give up on social media just because someone wrote something mean about you online. Instead, restaurant owners need to take the time to create a strategy to become their brand’s community manager. That’s either through hiring it out to another source, using a remote community manager or having someone on your staff respond to these things.

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