Yelp & Facebook – What New Partnership Means For Restaurants
April 23, 2010
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Yelp will become an even bigger player in the restaurant marketing mix after this week’s announcement that the user-generated review site has partnered with Facebook to integrate content between the two communities.
The collaboration aims to make the experience on Yelp more personalized for their members and make friends’ opinions on local businesses visible on Facebook.
Here’s an overview of the features announced on Wednesday:
- Yelp will pull personalized information from Facebook to automatically create a profile for new Yelp users.
- A new user will land on Yelp and be able to see which Facebook friends have reviewed a business and easily read their reviews.
- Users will be able to view a feed of what their friends are doing on Yelp (adding pictures, writing reviews, and liking businesses).
- Yelpers will be able to see which friends have “liked” a particular business
Yelp offers the following information about liking businesses on either of the sites:
- Any user logged into either Yelp or Facebook will be able to like a business on Yelp by pressing a Like button. This is similar to the functionality Facebook has that allows you to like the content your friends post on Facebook.
- Liking a business on Yelp will also mean you like it on Facebook, however users can opt out of sharing.
- Liking a business in Yelp means it will also show up on the user’s Facebook profile, much like the way pages fanned on Facebook are currently displayed. This link will point back to Yelp’s business page.
What should the savvy restaurant marketer do to make the most of these features? Join, engage, connect. Your goal as the face of the business in social networks should be to facilitate interaction with your brand. Business owners can no longer afford to sit on the sidelines while conversations regarding their establishments take place online. Whether or not you have raving fans or disgruntled patrons posting their thoughts on Yelp, their comments are going to have a much wider audience now that their opinions will be ported automatically to their friends on Facebook. This requires that there be an official voice of the restaurant conversing with customers in these venues.
If it hasn’t already been done, create an official presence on Facebook and Yelp. This entails claiming or adding the business listing in Yelp and creating a business page in Facebook. Once the profiles have been created, view activity on each of these pages on a daily basis. Yes, this takes time out of an already busy day, however it’s not as much as you might fear. Five to ten minutes each day should be adequate to monitor and respond to comments entered in Yelp and Facebook for an average independent restaurant. Even franchised businesses shouldn’t have to spend much more than that on social networking on the average workday.
It’s important to acknowledge both good and bad reviews – graciously accept compliments and quickly address any complaints that may appear. TwoTables strongly recommends responding publicly rather than sending private messages within the social sites. This serves two purposes: other users can see how you respond to make a negative situation better and you have shown that you are an active member of the Yelp & Facebook communities. Over time, this investment pays off in building trust and loyalty with your online customers.
I know that Yelp is a volatile subject in the restaurant industry and would love to hear how you feel about the new partnership with Facebook. How do you think this will affect your business? How will you adapt to this new paradigm? Let us know by leaving a comment!
If the ever-changing landscape of web marketing leaves you dazed and confused, please take a minute to contact us either by phone, email or via our quick and easy contact form. We’ll provide you with a free analysis of your restaurant’s online presence and specific tactics you can employ for improvement.
Twitter Announces Advertising Platform
April 14, 2010
Twitter announced a long-awaited and much-anticipated advertising model earlier this week. What does that mean for restaurants? Well, unless you are Starbucks, not much in this early rollout phase. Twitter will use brands such as Red Bull, Virgin America and Sony Pictures to test out their Promoted Tweets ad platform. Here’s the scoop:
Early on, the test advertisers will be able to promote their regular tweets to the Twitter community. Initially, these promoted tweets will show at the top of Twitter search results. For example, if a member searches for “Starbucks,” a promoted tweet from the coffeehouse chain may appear at the top of the list of search results. Twitter assures users that ads will be organic tweets and will provide added value and relevancy for both users and advertisers. Here’s a mockup of how the ads may appear when launched:
After some testing, Twitter plans to have promoted tweets appear in users timelines as well as in partner and client applications. They promise users that all promoted tweets will have to meet very stringent guidelines, including a “resonance factor.” If a promoted tweet doesn’t resonate with the Twitter faithful, judged by retweets, replies and favoriting, the promoted tweet will be pulled from display.
Peter Kafka of MediaMemo liveblogged at a followup presentation by Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the AdAge Digital Conference yesterday, where Costolo offered up more details, including the ability for advertisers to assign specific keywords to specific tweets they’ve published previously. The promoted tweets will stay at the top of the search stream. The pricing model to begin with will be cost-per-impression, however once they dial in the resonance metric, the pricing will move to an ROI model. During a Q&A session, Costolo revealed that at some point the ads will include the location as part of the platform, possibly offering nice opportunities for local-store marketing.
It’s expected that more details will emerge at the Chirp Conference, the Twitter developers gathering held today and tomorrow in San Francisco. Needless to say, TwoTables Internet Marketing for Restaurants will keep you posted as more information becomes available.
Getting the Big Picture, TwoTables Style
February 5, 2010
“Though the Web site may be the most important part of the marketing campaign, for true effectiveness it has to be part of a larger, big-picture marketing effort,” said Malcolm O’Keefe, CEO of the Blue River Interactive Group.
Amen! It was refreshing to see the TwoTables’ mantra published in the current issue of The Restaurant Standard, published by the California Restaurant Association. The article underscored several recurrent themes we have addressed in this blog, including:
- Regularly review the restaurant’s website to ensure that it is presenting a fresh, up-to-date image
- Keep SEO at the forefront of the website’s goals when contemplating a design/redesign project
- Integrate social media into the website
- Adopt a simple, easy-to-use content management system (such as WordPress) so that any member of the staff, no matter how technically-savvy, can make updates to the site
- Keep the website simple and effective – avoid annoying “click to enter” landing pages, flash-only pages, intrusive music and poor photography
In addition to these points, I would add the following to the list to ensure a thorough Internet presence:
- Claim and update the restaurant’s local search profiles. (Find out in less than a minute if this has been done for your establishment here.) Make sure the full street address and phone number appear on every page of the website.
- Search for <restaurant’s city><restaurants> in Google. Where does the website currently rank in the search results? Do the title and description entice searchers to click through to the website? This step takes just a minute to complete and offers valuable insight into the restaurant’s search engine presence.
- Claim and update the restaurant’s listing on directories such as Yelp, UrbanSpoon, TripAdvisor and any local review sites.
- Monitor the restaurant’s online reputation at the above-mentioned sites and respond to reviews (both good and bad) when appropriate.
- Use social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook and a company blog, to create a community surrounding the business. SAME Cafe in Denver does a great job of utilizing their blog and Facebook to include their customers. They also realize the benefit of a redesign; currently TwoTables is developing a fresh, new look for their website.
- Review the website’s statistical data regularly. Don’t have access to this information? Ask your website hosting company to provide it. If they can’t, Google Analytics is a free tool that offers in-depth information about your website visitors.
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