Are Your Social Media Profiles Golden?

Optimizing Social Media Profiles

Social media comes in many flavors, shapes and forms. You have more then likely have heard much about social media and using it to give away food and beverages for free. It Seems everybody is willing to discount your food and beverages. I bet they would change their mind if it was their money that was paying for their inventory.

How do you use social media to build your business without discounting the entire menu, first step is to begin with your profiles.  But first lets define Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users, not direct employees of the web site.

The Purpose of Social media Marketing is to focus on branding, branding is about standing out in front and is about creating a dialogue creating two way discussions.

The Advantages of Social Media is:
1.    Free
2.    Unlimited Potential
3.    Large Audiences
4.    Potential Quick Success

TYPES OF SOCIAL MEDIA
1.    Social Bookmarking
2.    Crowd-sourced Content
3.    Blogs
4.    Blog Communities
5.    Micro media
6.    Social Networks
7.    Live Audio
8.    Customer Service Networks
9.    Video Aggregation
10.    Document Site

Setting Up Your Profile

Your Social Media profile is the most important thing you will do to create social media marketing campaigns.
Profiles build trust, Share information, promote your business and has some additional advantages including

Anchor text links
Your Own Hosted Pages
Control Your Content

Setting Up Your Social Media Profiles Correctly

1 Add anchor text links within the content to your website home page and additional page

2. use of the social media account web address is it your personally or your domain name as the name in the account address

3. The Content you create you have control of

4. Link Your Profile to As many other profiles you can

5.    Use a Photo You want to use for a long time this photo will be associated with your brand and you

Optimize Your Link Profiles

In Order to avoid getting ding for repetitive and duplicate content you must write unique profiles for each social media profile you build. The links also have to be rotated and cannot be exact from one profile to another. The real advantage is the ability to use more then a hand ful of keywords linking to your site and forces you to use additional keywords in your keyword string you are targeting.

Remember repetition in content from site to site is a red flag for Google to look for spam, by having unique content and links from profile to profile Google will believe that you are following their guidelines and terms of service for other webmasters and prevents the Google Spam teams from being attracted to your sites.

Additional Profile Link Strategies

Profiles are also a great way and tool to link to your articles, blog posts, guest posts, and Press Releases out on the internet this strategy also strengthens your overall links or what is called “link juice” to your site

Cross Promote to your Other Social Media Sites cross promote at every opportunity you get this builds incredible trust and credibility on line.

Time To Get Social

After your infrastructure is set up it is time to get social and join groups, find friends, and invite people to follow you. This is not something you have to spend 24 hours a day doing but do you must but you must track your fans and interact with them build your business relationships!

Our next step is then to learn how to be a “power user” with the targeted tools you are wanting to brand and market your self on

Make sure your google and follow Muhammad Saleem a definite social media expert Now go and build your social media infrastructure to maximize your marketing efforts.

What is in Your Brand?

Being the restaurant employer of choice is something we teach. The purpose is to attract and retain the best employees in the market. The result will be extraordinary service providing the best and brightest and most talented people in your market.   Unfortunately products menu items, restaurant recipes and service tends to become a commodity over time and for good reasons.

Over time the value of a product and or service lessens, when we first create a new menu item or provide an increased level of service we are usually solving a problem. Customers and guests are usually willing to pay a premium for the latest and greatest product or service.

Over time the new product or service then becomes SOP or Standard Operating Procedure.

The new unique restaurant menu dish gets discovered by the restaurant chains and they dumb it down and slap it on the menu of a thousand restaurants, run months of restaurant marketing mass media advertising campaigns and completely obliviate the uniqueness of the product with some mediocre knock off.

The premium menu item becomes mainstream. and the price gets lower as the economies of scale adjust and then we see it in the grocer freezer of our local grocery store labeled gourmet! (bah humbug)

Buyers become Aware over time learn to better evaluate the economics of the new product and chain restaurant marketing then run these menu items as specials Basically as a commodity a restaurant menu item matures the price pressure coupled with a “tough economy” Sorry I hate to say that, makes it even harder to sell the product or service at a profit, assuming you are not a chain restaurant with extremely efficient supply chains.

What is on your Menu? (How would Capital One handle this?)

Restaurants can only discount products or services so far. Capital One in 1995 was not in a position to compete on rates with the big credit card companies. Rather then competing on rate to increase market share Capital One took a different approach to creating a new  marketing plan. They chose to compete on value.

Remember perception is reality. They implemented a “radical” “branding” “strategy” to differentiate themselves from the other credit card issuers to stimulate an increase in demand. All of this without discounting or sacrificing margins.

A Winning Brand Starts with The Customer

What made Capital One’s strategy work is the fact that they started with customer input to derive the strategy. Through serious market research they were able to target the most important features of a credit card the consumers wanted.  They did not stop there they actually created a family of products and features to target different types of card users.

Most important part of the research revealed that the features were not the most important lessons learned from the research. The realization that there customers actually had an emotional aspect of the decision process and not rational.

Their sales success is actually tied to the benefits to the emotional needs of the customer. Make life easier, “no hassles”.

Simplify

Busy has become the new good. When asked everyone is “busy” Simplify your message do not use elongated marketing fluffy language, this does not work in todays market. Capital One’s core message is “No Hassles” They then have fun hammering the message using not so bright  rowdy vikings to make the point. Then the “What’s in your wallet?”

Position Yourself as a Market Leader

• What is your Unique Position (Reference USP article) Are you focused on an area where you can outperform the competition? That means find the holes in between the chains and your geographic targeted market, neighborhood.
• The large corporates feederies are required to follow a very specific SO (Standard Operating Procedures) and cannot usually move outside of the brand very easily, use that rigid structure to your advantage. Perform a USP analysis and identify the market opportunity.
• What do your customers want, follow Capital Ones strategy and communicate, talk, ask, comment card everyone. Train the staff to find the answers you will be surprised how much they want to help. Is it specials, menu items,  price,  speed,  hours,  catering?
• Develop or better yet reposition current brand, products, menu offerings and or training to capitalize on the newly discovered information. How does this satisfy the emotional needs of your customers, What would you charge to “guarantee this product service”

Develop a Message

Build your USP reduce it to a simple tagline message, you know Fedex, “Absolutley positively has to be there overnight”.  The next step is to then identify your competitive advantage for your geographic market. What do you do better then anyone else.

Find and create the bold claim in your positioning message and focus on the one attribute of your product or service that satisfies an emotional need.

To (the geographic market you serve.) (your brand) is the one (that provides a type of service you offer) that (key benefit you deliver better than any other company in your market). Identify your Olive Garden “salad an breadsticks” (the core menu item(s) customers  love you for) and capitalize on it. Recreate your restaurant brand, update restaurant marketing and branding. Re-Invent, try stuff, try new stuff, and newer stuff all the while staying true to the core items on your menu.

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