Nation’s Restaurant News and partner DigitalCoCo, a digital branding and consulting agency, have created the most comprehensive tracking system for social media efforts in the restaurant industry to help businesses understand and compete in the social world.
The Nation’s Restaurant News Restaurant Social Media Index was developed to provide learnings that will help restaurants become more robust and effective in their use of social media, digital content and brand development. It gathers the basics of social media efforts, from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google, and utilizes third-party technologies — from the highly-acclaimed Klout rankings to the social analytic system Social Insights from DigitalCoCo — to determine what brands and actions are moving consumers.
The Restaurant Social Media Index, or RSMI, will become the restaurant industry’s go-to source for the latest brand information on social media analytics. Learn more about the new tool and register your restaurant brand today.
“This industry-leading index brings social-media monitoring in foodservice to a new level,” Sarah Lockyer, executive editor of NRN.com, said. “The RSMI is a living, breathing, proprietary system that tracks consumer and restaurant brand engagement via social media networks and third-party sources. The data will reveal best practices, surprises and strategies that NRN is eager to present to the industry.”
Quarterly index readings, monthly findings and special reports based on the RSMI will be a larger part of industry coverage from Nation’s Restaurant News in the months ahead.
The Restaurant Social Media Index is a quantitative tracking effort of more than 600 restaurant brands, more than 23 million consumers, and thousands of keywords, menu items and restaurant terms — each of which has been indexed during the past two years. The RSMI will dive deep, not only into brand actions, but also into the interaction in brand content quality, consumer engagement, consumer influence and overall reach of the brand.
“Social media is converging into real social business for the restaurant industry, and tracking the social-savvy consumer and their interactions is now a high-level priority of every brand,” Paul Barron, founder of DigitalCoCo, said. “Understanding the metrics of the industry is what we are focused on here at DigtialCoCo and that means digging into thousands of restaurant brands’ data to index what is working and what is not.”
“As the founding sponsor of the RSMI, our goal is to help operators break down the areas where they can improve their social media efforts and convert it into social business,” Barron says.
The RSMI is built on a proprietary algorithm that analyzes several third-party social media indexes and then applies the DigitalCoCo Social Insights algorithm. This allows the RSMI to both identify top brands, but also to level the playing field between emerging restaurants and large chains, because the index does not simply tally numbers of followers or fans. The RSMI is built on an entirely new methodology that is surrounded by several trusted data sources that drive the social web.
Today, all restaurant brands have the opportunity to join this index and learn more about their own social footprint.
