Hilinsky Consulting Social Media Blog

Incorporating a properly thought out social media strategy into your restaurant’s current marketing plan is an effective way to leverage your businesses’ visibility in a saturated market.

A customized Facebook fan page is a good way to leverage your brands image and maybe even incorporate a contest into your social media strategy.

Here’s our list of best Facebook fan pages for restaurants:

1. Outback (176,300+ fans)- This page gives you the opportunity to order online, and offers a free Bloomin’ Onion for becoming a fan.

Once you become a fan, you need to provide Outback with your contact information as well as answer a couple simple questions, such as “what is your favorite location.”

As a business, this instant “focus group” scenario is a valuable way of gauging the market without the effort of coordinating an official focus group or market research study. Obviously, the results would not be as in-depth as either the focus group or market research study scenario, but a good way to get a lot of information on your brand fast nevertheless.

The viral capabilities made possible by this sort of strategy are fairly brilliant. After the information is submitted it automatically generates a status update for you that says: “I just got a bloomin’ onion!” and provides a link to the tab for you to post in your feed. After you publish (or skip) it automatically takes you to the “suggest your friends” become fans of this page section, reducing the amount of time the new fan would spend sharing the promotion.

After this, it takes you to a customized landing page for the location you chose as your favorite and lets you order online, get driving directions, view the dinner menu, or purchase a gift card.

So much utility, all in the comfort of the customers Facebook… The Outback is really taking the concept of engaging prospects in “their own backyard” to a new level; and we love it!

P.S. Did we mention that you also have to buy an entree to use your coupon? Here’s that instant ROI for you..

The only downside of this strategy: this app strategically tricks the potential fan into signing up for the newsletter as well as obviously allowing Outback the access to their network.. No bueno if you’re not a willing recipient.

In their defense, they due list this information in the app before you give them your email address. An informed consumer is a happy consumer.

2. Chili’s (171,200+ fans)- The Chili’s page utilizes several good concepts.

They have a menu tab that looks like their website, another one for the “Tailgate Tour 2009″ contest, this draws fans to enter the contest at their site. Most importantly, they have a contest tab for their “Baby Back Ribs Jingle Contest.”

The steps for the “Jingle Contest” are fairly simple and straightforward, yet quite brilliant.

The steps are as follows:

1. Become a fan

2. Create a 30 second video of your jingle

3. Upload your video to the video gallery

4. Share your jingle to increase your chances of winning

Brilliant I tell you! It’s fun and the viral capabilities of a contest like this are a no-brainer. Did I mention the winner gets a thousand bucks?

30 seconds = an opportunity to win 1000 dollars. ‘Nuff said.

The factor that really makes this contest work is that the winner is chosen based on the number of likes and comments they receive on their video. What a great way to increase their brand awareness.

3. Applebee’s (122,200+ fans)- The Applebee’s page Veteran’s Day tab is a great way to spread the word about their brand and thank the men and women who serve our Country at the same time. They included a way for you to invite a friend who has served, share the tab with friends on Facebook, and includes buttons to their Twitter and YouTube profiles.

4. Red Lobster (51,300+ fans)- Oh Red Lobster.. A for effort!

The concepts are all in place, but they could have done so much better on tying them together and creating a viral campaign.

Their promotion tab has a video, a contests, a newsletter sign-up but the strategy is lacking. The commercial video is working poorly, the contest (obviously a collaborative effort between Red Lobster and TNT) is not well-explained or tied into Facebook, and the newsletter sign-up simply redirects you to their site.

The reason why I chose this fan page, even though it’s poorly executed, has a great video tab (once again poorly executed). I’m in love with the concept of restaurants becoming a community for cooking tips and recipe sharing… And they’ve done a great job at creating some awesome viral content; to then post it on the YouTube Facebook App! Why oh why? So much wasted effort.

Worst part is that the tab won’t even work for me so I can’t fully evaluate it. Such a shame. This kind of content would spread fast if only supplemented with the right tools and the right backend application hosting in-place. If Red Lobster only created their own tab for these YouTube videos and offered appropriate sharing tools, this campaign would be much more successful. When done strategically this is the kind of community building that can really accelerate your community building efforts on Facebook.

Looking for some MORE inspiration – here are 5 more great Facebook fanpages for restaurants:

5. The Cheesecake Factory

6. Panera Bread

7. Chipotle

8. Rubio’s

9. Olive Garden

Want one created for you? Here’s a simple FBML landing page we created for Orale (unofficially). We have a team of Facebook design specialists who can create an amazing and engaging experience for your new visitors and existing fan base. Contact us for more information on our Facebook fan page customizations and application development services.

(By the way, we officially heart fish tacos!)

Stay tuned for our contest pages, coming soon!

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