Which social network should your restaurant use?
Are you feeling overwhelmed with the apps, platforms, and social networks you could or should be leveraging?
You’re not alone.
The challenge affects restaurant marketers of every size: those of you working for massive brands, regional chains, and definitely independents.
In the beginning, when it came to digital marketing you had your website. Having a website was the goal. Just being at myrestaurant.com was sufficient to many restaurants.
Then you realized you still had to “get found” with that website, so you could tantalize people into visiting your location(s).
There were two approaches for this: 1) a Flash-driven website where you literally tried to mimic your look, feel, atmosphere, and brand personality; and 2) an SEO-friendly website where you came up high in search results. You definitely could not have both.
(Of course, that’s not to say that everyone really went one of those two routes, as you saw when you watched our latest This Week in Restaurant Tech episode.
Then Yelp came along. And TripAdvisor.
You had SMS break through as a weapon/platform.
And then Twitter. Facebook.
And now Instagram. Pinterest. LinkedIn. Google+. And shoot, if Taco Bell and all their digital marketing majesty is our guide, you’ve got to to think through Snapchat now too. More on that one in an upcoming couple of posts.
Whew.
I’m glad to have stumbled across this infographic below from the team at Leverage New Age Media via Randy Lopez (thanks Randy).
Okay, so it doesn’t breakdown Snapchat. And it’s not a how-to by any means. But it is a really nice, concise synopsis of each platform’s reach, demographics, and how each network is best used, or leveraged, shall we say.
Quick takeaways:
- Pinterest users are 32% male and 68% female.
- Twitter has over 560 million active users.
- Facebook share 2.5 billion pieces of content each day.
- Instagram isn’t limited to phot0-sharing; don’t discount its 15-second video feature.
- Google+ can’t be ignored; it’s growing rapidly with 925,000 new users every day.
- While LinkedIn seems B2B focused, its reach is expanding, and 79% of users are 35 or older.
If viewing the graphic just doesn’t work for you, feel free to download the full Social Network Infographic as a PDF. Nice work, Leverage team.
