Tomato Media

Why recipes matter in social media

Dr Social — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:58:01 +0000

Q: What’s the most competitive area for food on the web? A: recipes. In a week when NineMSN launched its new food portal, the recipe battle online just got fiercer. The competition is for which website has the most rcipes best optimised to be found in Google searches whether it be Taste, Gourmet Traveller, SBS Food or whichever. There’s a reason for this. Recipes mean traffic. People want recipes. The big traffic blogs mostly rely on recipes. Therefore if you are a restaurant it makes sense to publish search engine optimised recipes on your website, preferably in a blog format, to help drive traffic. If you are using WordPress you probably want to use the Recipe SEO plugin to help get you up in search results. The good thing about recipes is that they are interesting to people andcan stimulate people to do something further reinforcing your brand. I suggest thinking of a blog-like website where you create a “news” category and take that category’s RSS feed and make it a newsletter with an email service like Mailchimp. Importantly, recipes generate links from blogs and other social media sites which are the drivers of the best quality and most engaged traffic to websites. More links means more google juice (credibility in Google search). Everything points to making recipes an important part of your web content plan.

What about monitoring social media?

Dr Social — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:45:22 +0000

People always ask about monitoring tools for social media. There are plenty of very expensive solutions out there designed for big brands. But I suspect for many food and drink businesses costs are always going to be an issue simply because many aren’t that big. Luckily some of the best tools are free, although if you do feel inclined to pay for any probably Hootsuite is the best. Some of these tools have the ability to pre assign activity, but I’m not sure if this is a good thing. Things such as Facebook and Twitter are conversational. Think about chatting to somebody at a bar, or a party. You can’t be conversational if you have a robot sending out tweets pre programmed several hours or days earlier. You best and most influential activity will be rapid fire conversations you dip in and out of. If you just want to broadcast your own news then you are doing it wrong. You have to mix that news in with other more interesting conversations – football or racing perhaps -and not too often. However, I am an advocate of planned social media activity – one blog post a week, targeting 5 new Twitter followers a day, 1 Facebook conversation a day, 5 new food photos uploaded a week etc. It means you keep the activity constant, which is one of the secrets of success. So here are the basic monitoring tools: 1. Google Alerts Updates that mention terms you specify. 2. Advanced Twitter Search 3. Tweetdeck Tweet from multiple accounts and send updates to multiple social media platforms. Monitor mentions by setting up searches. 4. Seesmic A bit like Tweetdeck but with added features. 5. Hootsuite The only drawback is you have to pay, although only from USD5.99 a month, for the full features although there is a free version. 6. Klout The key to monitoring is measuring and one thing you may want to measure is your influence as a brand. Klout is a pretty useful tool to get a basic idea.

Specifications for a restaurant website

Dr Social — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:36:23 +0000

If you want to see what it should look like then visit El Loco in Sydney and check it on your pc and mobile phone. 1. Front page blog like functionality with RSS feed 2. Allow multiple categories in blog with individual RSS feeds. 3. Mailchimp email sign-up form front page in sidebar. Mailchimp takes RSS feed to make email. Email send to Facebook/Twitter. 4. Twitter stream in right hand sidebar 5. Facebook open graph tags on front page so Facebook like button works as one for Facebook page and webpage. 6. Menu pages in text (with pdfs also featuring) 7. Each blog update sends update to Twitter 8. Badges for Facebook like, Follow on Twitter, Linkedin etc and Foursquare across all pages. 9. Ability to create photo gallery from RSS feed of Flickr gallery. Or Instagram. 10. Location page: A Google map. 11. An open source content management system. Ideally WordPress but Joomla or Drupal are fine. 12. Ensure that you have a version optimised for smartphone viewing.

A rough guide to socialmedia for restaurants

Dr Social — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:43:59 +0000

Ed charles social media for restaurants

View more presentations from Tomato Media

This is a slideshow outlining a verbal presentation I gave to members of Restaurant and Catering in Melbourne last week.

Doing Better Business 10 October 2011

Dr Social — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:25:16 +0000

If you want to find out how social media can help your hospitality business win fans and customers, I’ll speaking at one of the restaurant and catering Doing Better Business Seminars on 10 October at Nobu. I’ll be talking about what modern day consumers expect from a restaurant and their website. In contrast to being a threat social media now provides free market research to businesses helping them give customers what they want. The implication for businesses is that you have to give customers information that they want in the places they want. that means designing your website correctly but also ensuring that menus, opening times and maps are also spread around the rest of the web. You can download the booking form below. DBB – The Buzz on Social Media VIC