In the era of online marketing, it appears that restaurants are the slowest establishments that embrace social media marketing. This could be attributed to the fact that they want to protect their secret recipes or they’re just reluctant to see what people are saying about their brand. Regardless, Rev Media Marketing reported that new breed of restaurateurs are beginning to incorporate social media marketing to their campaigns.

Bringing the Right Message

Delivering what their customers want is one way for restaurants to use social media. Owner of Let’s YO Yogurt Eric Casaburi shared:

“The customer for Let’s YO yogurt is just a huge demographic and the way we communicate with them … we’re just going to market so many different ways, talking to people who we know are customers because we’ve identified them. We know how to speak to them — that’s key. We have the message in the right place.”

In fact, Pew Research Center recently released a study stating that 55 percent of adults search for restaurant, bar and club information online. Majority of the respondents uses the Internet to search for that information, and 3 percent of them are using social networking sites. Therefore, restaurant owners must strategically use the power of social media for their benefit other than expanding their fans or followers.

Using the Power of Social Media

Other than amassing a number of followers, there are different strategies that restaurant owners can use social media to promote their brand. Below are simple tips on how restaurateurs can use social media to their advantage.

1. Reach out to customers who share positive feedback about your brand, and make their messages a part of your restaurant’s marketing campaign.
2. Make your customers feel a part of your brand’s success by giving them the first glimpse of what’s new from the kitchen. To make the experience even better, invite them for free tasting.
3. You can also allow your followers to promote your business page by having a “fan of the week” contest. Have them take a picture of themselves with their favorite product from your restaurant, and let their friends vote for the picture. Whoever gets the most number of votes will get a free or discounted product from your establishment.

Food industry using the social media is good news for marketers, as restaurants are starting to take advantage of this platform to make their customers’ experience the taste of their brand. As for restaurant owners, they’ve found a new and creative way of engaging their consumers.

Last week, Facebook announced a new feature, which enables users to try out games straight from the News Feed. The new Feed Gaming is part of the social media giant’s effort to improve game discovery. In addition, this allows developers to create a short demo of their games that users can play whenever it is mentioned in the News Feed and Timeline.

The Good Side of Game Demos on Facebook

The good thing about this feature is that it doesn’t collect data, and it doesn’t require users to authorize an app. This creates a risk-free environment for the player to test a game before committing to it. Once the sample is complete, they will be prompted to play the game’s full version.

King’s Bubble Witch Saga, Angry Birds Friends by Rovio, Tetris Online’s Tetris Battle and Idle Worship by Idle Games are now using Facebook’s Feed Gaming. Demos have been a reliable tactic in the gaming industry when it comes to building the word-of-mouth hype. This also lets developers test the effectiveness of various game samples, images and copy in their feed stories. In turn, they can leverage in-feed gaming to create engaging stories for users.

Using the Word-of-Mouth Hype in Feed Gaming

As mentioned earlier, demos are reliable tactics when building hype for a particular game. In the case of Facebook’s Feed Gaming, this involves publishing a News Feed story on behalf of the user with an attached Flash object.

When a user’s friend sees this post, they will be given an option to play the game inline. This gives way for interesting scenarios for a game’s embeddable version. Being able to post a game preview on a user’s Timeline, developers can encourage other players to click-through their canvass app.

Other than publishing a game preview, game developers can also opt in to do the following:

• Publish high scores on a game’s particular level and challenge the user‘s friends to beat it.
• Post a replay of an interesting game activity so that other users can see how to complete a level.
• Create an embeddable mini-game that could encourage users to play the full version.

However, any users who are interacting to the game demo will be anonymous. This means that game devs will find it impossible to monitor whether a user has previously installed the game or not. Thus, they will have to consider making a Facebook game that would be useful for both new and existing players.

Since its public release last year, Google+ definitely made a buzz, and a basket full of improvements were rolled out for the benefit of its users. But whether it’ll be a “Facebook killer” or not remains to be seen.

On the other hand, its ever-expanding user base and simple sharing tools makes the young social network something that you won’t ignore. And what’s the best way to use its features to the full extent than to integrate it on your website?

Add the +1 Button

Clicking the +1 button enables your site visitors to search, share and save their favorite content on the Web. Using Google’s official +1 button code generator, it’ll only take a minute to add the button to your website, and for your content to be integrated with any Google profile. Simply put, the +1 button is an additional avenue for promoting and sharing your web content.

Embed Your Google+ Profile

A WordPress widget created by PlusDevs Software Developer John Henson lets you display your Google+ profile on your website or blog. You can set the widget up by just simply installing the plug-in to your website, dragging the widget to your sidebar and filling in a form. An embeddable Google+ Profile widget is also available on SocialStatistics.com, or you can incorporate your profile with a few PHP code lines.

Share Your Google+ Updates

Designed to share real life activities with your friends, Google+ lets you embed your status updates on your WordPress website. Just simply download the Google+ WordPress widget, insert your Google+ ID and you’re good to go. The sidebar widget will show your recent status updates, including your Google Buzz.

Use Google+ Inspired Theme

Whether you are a fan of Google+’s clean and unobtrusive layout or you own a blog that deals with the search engine giant’s social media, then you might like to use WordPress’ Google+ themes for your website. There’s a clean, fast-loading and search engine optimized theme like the WP Plus; a clean and well-designed theme like PlusOne; and a smooth and seamless Reflex+ design.

 

Google+ may no longer be considered as a young social media, but it still has plenty of rooms for improvement when it comes to user features. Its progress could also provide a wide array of options for publishers, and this could also be another social networking platform where business owners could build and expand their online presence.