Mooyah Burgers & Fries, which ranked No. 1 in the Facebook growth category of the fourth-quarter Restaurant Social Media Index, considers the social-media platform as just one layer in a fully loaded marketing sandwich.
Through such promotions as driving traffic to a “free fries for a year” giveaway on its corporate website, and posting humorous observations about current events, Internet trends and topics to engage consumers, Dallas-based Mooyah is building its Facebook presence. The 25-unit burger concept has more than 42,100 “likes” of its Facebook page and more than 400 “talking about it.”
“Social networks in general, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or things like LinkedIn or Yelp, are all part of our overall marketing strategy,” said Alexis Barnett, Mooyah’s director of marketing.
“While we have definitely been taking a strong social-media approach as a restaurant, we also want to make sure we use it as part of a larger, 360-degree approach to ensure that the campaign is most effective,” she said. “We have found through our tests that it’s not effective just on its own, so we definitely like to use it as part of our larger strategy in all of our markets.”
Mooyah outsources its Facebook management to DigitalCoCo, the Miami-area agency that also produces the RSMI. Results of the RSMI are independent of client relationships held by DigitalCoCo.
“We partner together on strategy and the engagement tools we use and specific messages that go out,” Barnett said. “We review and approve everything, but I’m not the actual person at the computer who types it and applies it.”
Jeffrey Kingman, DigitalCoCo’s director of social business, said Mooyah’s most popular recent Facebook post was a January "Friends Fry Free" digitally interactive campaign.
“The post read, ‘We've loved ALL the Friend Fry Zone pics! Now we want to know … who do you spend time with?’” Kingman explained. “This individual post [as part of a month-long social post plan layer] scored 106-percent engagement.”
Barnett said giveaways, ranging from t-shirts and gift cards to movie tickets or a free year of fries, provoke a lot of action and also can drive traffic to the corporate website, where the company can gather email information.
The Facebook post that got the most “talking about it” action was a name-game post. “Our brand analyst, Alli Jones, shared a simple interactive based on coding language, that when you typed in the last three digits of your phone number, would return the name of a specific Facebook user,” Kingman said. “The community 'tripped out,’ with over 500 comments inside of 24 hours [with] everyone giving it a try. Total reach on this post was nearly 10,000 extended community.”
Mooyah offers a wide variety of posting styles on its Facebook page, Barnett said.
“On some days, maybe it’s a link to a news story or a video, or perhaps a contest or program where they can win something,” she said. “We’re always looking for different ways so we can hear from our guests in the organic environment that Facebook and Twitter and those social networks offer.”
She said the company works to keep the language and posts “playful and genuine and conversational.”
“We want the guest to feel like we’re heard them and that we’re taking action on their great feedback,” she said.
Paul Barron, founder and chief executive of DigitalCoCo, said the business relationship with Mooyah did not affect the RSMI scoring. “The RSMI is a three-part measurement system that includes the popular Klout score, Sentiment Analytics and Social Insights data that is culled from more than 30 million U.S consumers via DigtialCoCo,” he said. “Each of these three independent measurements makes up the overall RSMI score, so that not any single score may influence the other.”
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Barnett said she gets weekly reports from DigitalCoCo on who is engaging with the Facebook posts. And she added that Mooyah looks to its franchisees to provide interesting topics to make the Facebook posts more local.
“As our audience grows, we have to be careful about who is actually following us,” she said. “We don’t want our voice to change, but we want to continue to provide relevant information and topics for those consumers.”
Contact Ron Ruggless at Ronald.Ruggless@penton.com.
Follow him on Twitter: @RonRuggless