In short, restaurants and hotels should encourage and train employees in STRATEGIC social media use because proper use of these tools will motivate personal responsibility, provide greater job fulfillment, and lead to improved employee productivity.
Connecting directly with customers makes your employees’ work more fulfilling leading to more loyal, passionate employees. If you’re the boss, you know that keeping employees happy, motivated and highly productive is your key to success. There is a myth circulating out there that says that social media will lead to lower productivity – I’m here to tell you that nothing could be farther from the truth. Employees with an inclination to be lazy will find a way to be unproductive whether they are allowed to use social media at work or not.
However, good employees will do the opposite and improve your bottom line. Our restaurant and hotel clients tell us they attribute larger and larger percentages of sales to social media each month, with the same team of human resources. Sales are made more quickly and in a shorter sales cycle. Sales are made when they’re needed. And employees are able to become more and more passionate about their positions – and create more and more value for YOU in their positions. Andrew, a General Manager at one of our client restaurants put it best when he wrote us the following about his social media experience after a training session with Andy:
“We have been doing the Twitter thing here, and I have to say I am quite impressed. As of now we have over 700 people following us on Twitter alone.
We want to create actual interaction with people instead of them just reading a post we pushed out there.
One of the things that we have done is put interesting facts out about us and our restaurant. ‘Did you know that Americans consume more ice cream per person than any other nationality?’ These are great because they spark interest in a way towards us and our brand.
Another thing that we have done is doing trivia about our restaurant. One question sparked 20+ people interacting and commenting. People were even cross commenting to people that got the answer wrong. That is amazing because we created buzz about us by asking just one question. We tried this again with a free scoop of ice cream ($2) to the first person who could tweet back with an answer. Again the same thing happened.
The coolest part is the fact that people are ACTUALLY interacting with us! We have even gone through and posted pictures as well. GUESTS love that! Whenever we post a picture of something that is NOT pizza or ice cream, we usually get back comments like, ‘Ohh… I never knew you all could do Sea Bass’ and ‘Wow… that Shrimp looks amazing.’
I think the key to this is to have fun with it. It really is not that hard and is not that time consuming. Just think about it on a slower Saturday night if you post ‘We’re officially OFF THE WAIT.’ Could this bring in any extra revenue on an already slow night? Maybe…”
