Steve Rin is a new media consultant in Orange County. For 2 years he has consulted many companies from restaurants and retail to sports industry and corporations. He is currently representing 10 different companies that all require unique things from their new media campaigns. His experience has helped him to meet their needs as well as find creative ways to engage customers and eventually create brand loyalty for clients. He is a socially active early adopter type which helps him find new ways to help all kinds of businesses. He can be best reached via Twitter @enjoioc.
Steve shared some insights into working with one of his Orange County restaurant clients, zpizza. zpizza has been a pioneer in the Orange County area in openly embracing social media as an essential part of their business model. As the landscape continues to grow and mature they will be a brand that will benefit from the fan engagements that are created because of their participation and understanding of their social media networks. Here are some helpful tips Steve shared that both small businesses and community managers should find useful:
1) Engaging your customers is more important than throwing promotions at them.
zpizza started to use social media as most restaurants do, by promoting their daily specials to help increase their sales. It became clear early on that social media would best serve them as a way to engage their fans and build loyalty. It’s great to offer a deal every now and then, but tweeting and posting deals on Facebook constantly made their communications impersonal and didn’t encourage any conversations. I strongly believe that a successful social media campaign revolves around engaging your customers. To do this you must get to know who your customers are and why they love your brand. When I post for zpizza I try to do so in a way that gives our customers an inside look at the day to day operations. We offer customers the chance to get to know our employees and connect with them by sharing staff hobbies, their favorite zpizza AND their favorite non-zpizza dishes.
2) Nobody wants to follow a brand tha
t constantly talks about themselves over and over again.
When you do offer a promotion make it fun, creative and personal to the customers. During the NBA playoffs and more recently the FIFA World Cup we tweeted/Facebook’d game scores, game updates and then tied some of our promotional meal deals based on halftime periods where you could get a buy one and get one free zpizza if you called in during halftime. Also by partnering with local organizations like we did with OCTA for a Halloween “Trick-or-Tweet” tweetup you can increase the amount of people seeing your promotions.
3) Building brand loyalty online doesn’t happen overnight, learn to see things from a customer perspective.
Social media is a tool that many companies want to adopt because it is the trendy thing to do, but with that attitude comes a false perception that overnight twitter or Facebook will land 100+ customers at their doorstep at no cost to them. The reality is that businesses first need to understand that a social media campaign doesn’t happen overnight and you need to build relationships with the fans that you acquire over time. Getting to know the fans of your brand will help you better understand how your brand is perceived in their eyes as opposed to having the company tell their fans how they want to be perceived.
4) Use your
social networks to your benefit.
The social media networks and monitoring tools out there today can provide many companies with instant feedback on ways to improve their business. It can help resolve customer service issues by providing companies both small and large the chance to directly respond to a customers concerns, therefore, strengthening the relationship they have with that person and ultimately increasing their brand loyalty. zpizza utilizes Facebook, Twitter and Youtube to spread their conversations through the web. The trio of these platforms allows us to communicate to a wide variety of fans. For the quick up to date meal deals we utilize twitter and also monitor our feedback from customer experiences they had at our stores. Facebook allows us to build that long term relationship and further increase our brand loyalty as we encourage fans to write on our Facebook wall and post pictures and links. Youtube gives us a way to broadcast the lifestyle and culture that is zpizza. Fans can get a glimpse of the laid back and environmentally conscious atmosphere that surrounds our stores and our employees.
You can connect with the zpizza nearest you via Facebook or Twitter. Steve manages these accounts for the Tustin and Santa Ana locations:
Click here to visit Press75.com.
