This is part of NRN's Restaurant Social Media Index coverage. Learn more.

Brands atop the new Nation’s Restaurant News Restaurant Social Media Index show that the quality, not just the quantity, of fans and followers matters the most when trying to elevate a brand presence in social media.

The Restaurant Social Media Index, or RSMI, is brought to you by NRN and calculated and sponsored by DigitalCoCo, a social media analytics and digital branding firm for the restaurant industry. RSMI tracks and quantifies the social-media efforts of more than 600 restaurant brands by indexing mentions and the social-media engagement with more than 23 million consumers using thousands of keywords, menu items and restaurant terms indexed over the past two years.

More than 100 restaurant brands have submitted their profiles to the index since NRN and DigitalCoCo announced the project in August.

In this inaugural release of third-quarter data, the top 100 brands are showcased, and ranked on a 300-point index scale backed by a proprietary algorithm tallying numbers of followers and fans on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, influencer scores from providers like Klout and DigitalCoCo’s Social Insights platform.

Meet the third-quarter top 100 social media brands.

“If [restaurants] don’t have a sustained strategy surrounding the brand to grow audience and engage them, it’s not going to do anything,” Paul Barron, founder of DigitalCoCo, said of social-media branding efforts. “In the digital world we can’t eat what [restaurants are] trying to talk about, but what we can do is learn about the brand.”

Third-quarter results

While sheer size in Twitter followers and Facebook “likes” doesn’t hurt Starbucks Coffee, for example, which had the No. 1 overall RSMI score of 243.2 out of 300, Barron said the bigger indicator of success for the coffee chain is the spread between it and the next largest chains. Starbucks’ 25.2 million likes lead McDonald’s 10.4 million likes by a large margin, but Starbucks’ dominance in Twitter followers — 1.7 million to 169,000 for Subway — has much more to do with its lead in overall RSMI score, Barron said.

“The big story in followers is the fact that Starbucks is able to convert its social audience fairly well on Twitter, where the bigger brands are still fairly low [in follower count] compared to their Facebook following,” Barron said.

Barron said the question his firm gets from restaurants most is on which social-media platform a brand should focus to maximize its digital-marketing return on investment. The data support an investment in Twitter, he said.

“Facebook is very powerful and tremendous for reaching a mass audience, but it’s an audience that may or may not dine out a lot,” he said. “The influencer audience in Twitter has the most potential impact for restaurants. You don’t need a lot of [influential followers], but you need to know who they are.”

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