Network Booster

In 2009, social media officially shed its “fad” tag. Facebook surpassed 350 million users worldwide, adding some 500,000 per day, and Twitter grew 1,300 percent.

Based on sheer numbers alone, both sites offer potential for businesses. But with roots in consumer-to-consumer connection, retailers have been challenged to find the right kinds of interaction. SocialGrub, a new social media marketing solution, intends to help retailers leverage the divide by building relationships with their fans, who, in turn, share that relationship with their social network.

It works like this: A retailer or restaurateur sets up a page on Facebook and solicits its customers as fans. Retailers can target promotions or coupons to those fans, link directly to the item being promoted and even offer a “buy-it-now” function. Restaurants also can offer links to online reservation systems or online ordering. For sites with multiple locations, the promotions can be targeted to specific stores.

The power of social media, though, is in using those fans to promote products to their friends. Fans of SocialGrub clients can add the application to their Facebook pages and share the promo with their friends. As the average Facebook user has 130 friends and at least half of all of Facebook users log on daily, it’s easy to see how retailers can expand their reach – and quickly.

“People trust their friends,” says Sam Rubin, SocialGrub’s chief grub, because they’ve “been around a lot longer than Facebook or Twitter. How many times have you said, ‘I’m traveling to Atlanta’ and a friend will say, ‘I had the best meal here’? I think that’s where social media is going. Instead of asking friends for feedback, they’re giving you feedback and that’s shaping your buying.”

Making the connection easier
Connecting with fans via Facebook or Twitter is something that can be implemented without SocialGrub, of course, but there are advantages to using the company’s solution, Rubin says. SocialGrub clients (who pay as little as $50 per month for a single-unit operator) have a VIP tab on the fan page. That means when a new offer is available, it is housed under the tab rather than as a post, which gets pushed down on the page as others comment on different topics.

Then there’s ease of use. “You can push out an offer in 30 seconds,” Rubin promises. “You can create the offers with one click of a button and it instantly goes out on Facebook. There’s no delay, like with the Sunday paper. It makes it easier and accessible, and it’s a stand-alone application that exists outside of Facebook or Twitter. You don’t have to know how to utilize either of those to work SocialGrub.”

The back end of SocialGrub also allows a retailer to create a promotion for Facebook and, just by clicking a box, also send it out to Twitter. Or, if a promoted item runs out, it can be “unpublished” in a click.

The platform launched in beta form in early November, but SocialGrub is already cultivating fans. The company began a promotion for the Chicago-based pizza shop Go Roma, using Facebook and e-mail marketing to push a “Get us to 1,000 fans” promotion. In the five months that Go Roma had been trying to build its Facebook fan page, it had reached fewer than 100: SocialGrub pushed Go Roma over 1,000 in a week. The push had an incentive – if the company reached 1,000 fans by a set date, each fan would receive a free flatbread pizza.

Rubin believes that social media is the “second coming of the Internet” and that retailers of all sizes need to be involved with it. Not as a function that’s assigned to an intern or a high school student, either. “People are building a relationship with your brand,” he says.