Red Lobster Seafood Co. credits the shareable qualities of seafood and its artful use of social media platforms for its continued dominance in the Nation’s Restaurant News Social 200 ranking.
Since the beginning of 2015, Red Lobster has placed at or near the top of the rankings, and Mark Gilley, the brand’s senior vice president of marketing and communications, credited a cross-media approach for the success.
“The biggest thing about our social media program is that it really does play upon the fact that our guests love to share their experience at Red Lobster,” Gilley told Nation’s Restaurant News. “Seafood is a very shareable food and you eat a lot with your hands. It’s much more tactile [than other culinary segments]. It’s also easy to share visually, which works well with sharing on social media.”
Gilley, who joined the 700-unit chain in 2009, said the brand works hard at engagement, and uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube as its primary social platforms.
“One of the things that we began to notice several years ago was our guests really like to engage with us when it comes to both the food and the experience they are having in the restaurant,” Gilley said, adding that it peaks around special promotions like Endless Shrimp and LobsterFest.
While the brand, which was sold by Orlando, Fla.-based Darden Restaurants Inc. last year to San Francisco-based private-equity firm Golden Gate Capital, has maintained its long emphasis on television advertising, social and digital have become a growing part of the messaging mix, Gilley said.
“We’ve been a very TV-advertising dominant brand,” Gilley said. “We will continue to do that, because our food looks so great on television. But we wanted to make sure we were staying relevant in the category, and social media has helped us play that role. It’s also made the brand be more contemporary.”
Gilley said trends show consumers are watching less television than in the past.
“While there still is a lot of demand for TV, ratings are falling a bit,” he said. “So social has really helped us engage with guest and deepen the relationship we have with our guests.”
Red Lobster uses a wide range of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
“We’re always looking for new ways to engage,” Gilley said. “We typically use Facebook more as a platform to communicate out to our guests, although we do ask them, of course, to engage with us.”
Twitter is where Red Lobster works to engage in conversations that guests are having, Gilley said. Most recently, Red Lobster live-tweeted during the Super Bowl and the Oscars.
“We try to be of the conversation,” he said.
Other platforms, such as Instagram, are newer for the brand, Gilley said.
“That shows the food, the interaction with the food and brings that story to life,” he said.
“At first, it was a pure adjunct to our television advertising,” he said. “Over the course of the last two years, it has become bigger part of what we do internally with our marketing team as well as our advertising agency, Publicis Kaplan Thayer, and our public relations agency, MWW, and our media agency.”
For example, Red Lobster created for the first time this year custom YouTube content around its LobsterFest promotion. Gilley said most of the brand’s customer engagement is through Facebook.
“Our food looks really nice,” he said. “If we can entice people with what’s coming on Facebook and keep them engaged through the promotions.”
It approached football season with its Cheddar Bay Biscuits playing the role of football players in photo posts.
Staying on top of technology
Another popular offering was a Facebook coupon for a free appetizer or dessert offer, which got 20,000 shares in March.
Gilley said Red Lobster is always looking for new social media platforms and new places to promote the brand.
“We’ve been pushing Tumblr more with our Endless Shrimp contest with the hashtag #MyEndlessShrimp. And for our LobsterFest, with the hashtag #LobsterWorthy, we have people engage in a contest where people take pictures,” he said.
The brand, for example, asked consumers to post photos of themselves with “shrimp-staches,” where the shrimp were held up as moustaches in photos, and shrimp acting as photo bombs.
“They could put those photos out onto Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and they were all aggregated onto Tumblr,” Gilley said. “We were able to share the entries on our page.”
Gilley said Red Lobster considers two things of prime importance in social media.
“One is staying on top of the conversations that guests are having about us and being a part of that conversation. We want to learn from that conversation,” he said. “We want to make sure we have an active ear to what guests are saying about us.
The second thing, he added, is staying on top of the technology, which changes rapidly.
“I think about Facebook,” he explained. “At first it was very organic and now it’s an advertising medium in many ways.”
The corporate marketing team is divided into two groups, with one focusing on traditional advertising and one on digital. The groups come together with Red Lobster’s agencies two or three times a year, Gilley said. That can be as many as 25 people.
“Our agencies, while they are separate business agencies, come together much more often,” he added.
Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @RonRuggless
Correction April 14, 2015: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the parent company and the trademarked Lobsterfest promotion.
