Why restaurants should embrace the use of Twitter into their marketing mix

An article in the Charlotte Observer notes that many restaurants are slow to adopt the use of social media in their marketing efforts, but as someone who has just began to understand its capabilities, I wonder why. One of the biggest problems that Craig Utt, a restaurant consultant, noted in the article was restaurants had with social media was because of the time issue. While there is no charge (yet) to use Twitter as a way to communicate to customers, there is a labor charge. Someone has to take the time to complete all of those tweets and blogs.



As a longtime restaurant consultant, I think it's best to have a restaurant manager designate a younger person on the staff who is into social media to manage the campaign. For older restaurant managers, there's a longer learning curve in adding social media tools to your daily marketing mix.

As a source of inspiration, I want to list these restaurants that have effective Twitter sites:

http://twitter.com/BrasseriePavil: Not only does this San Antonio restaurant list specials, it also acknowledges guest and special parties with tweets like: rt @Facelogic Enjoyed brunch @brasseriepavil w/ @catharines@alessiomiceli @midsandhighs. Turned out to be group date instead of girl time.

http://twitter.com/mortons_cle: The Cleveland location of this venerable chain restaurant does an excellent job of promoting specials, the personality of the chef and personalities in the restaurant.

twitter.com/ChurchsChicken: This fast food franchise is using "Its Random Acts of Goodness" to bring in more customers. By combining traditional media, public relations and social media, it could show the trend for other restaurant chains and independent operations.