Don’t Let Your Competition Pull Your Social Media Plug (1 of 3)

Competitive Restaurant Owners Declare War On Your Facebook Page

Series: 1 of 3 – Friend or Fan?

If you think you are safe from your competition on Facebook, well think again!  The surge of Social Networking has given restaurant and bar owners a whole new way to keep in touch with their guests, bring value outside of the dining room and attract new guests through social interaction. With all this transparent exposure creates curiosity from competition to check out your sites and review your postings.  Increased competitive awareness isn’t always a negative situation; it can build initiative between businesses that will attract more guests to both locations with increased guest services, competitive pricing and creative event promotion.

As with the positive, there is also a negative and the competition is getting smarter.  There are several ways for your competition to fight dirty and in this series we are going to review exactly what those items are and how to protect yourself.

Pulling the Plug on your Facebook Page is our first discussion and the most serious!  Your restaurant or bar has decided to take on the social media marketing strategy.  With limited research or consultation you set-up a Facebook Friend page, as with your personal profile, instead of a fan page for your business.  You hear its harder to gain followers on a fan page and you can click “add friends” all day long to build a faster follower base.  This is a great strategy for short term but long term effects are worse.

Friend Pages are not only limited but setting up a friend page for a business is against Facebook Terms and Conditions., which is listed under Section 4, Line 4: You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain. You not knowing this situation, when your competition might, puts your page at risk.  This makes a perfect situation for your competition to close your Facebook site down.

Yep, this is a common tactic by most business owners and its becoming more popular.  You spend all this time setting up your page, start promotions, build a strong following of 2,000 people and when you login the next morning your page and your accounts are shut down by Facebook.  How does this happen, well you can thank knowledge of your competitor on how Facebook works.  Most common situation is that your competition searched for your pages, found that you are breaking terms with Facebook by soliciting a business on a personal profile site and reported your actions.

Facebook will then review the complaint and most likely shut down your account.  Worst of all, they will shut down the email being used, meaning you can never reuse the email that was used to set-up that false personal account.  All that work in building a following, your site is now down and you have lost the database of all those followers.

In short, start a Facebook Fan Page for your business.  There are huge benefits in creating a fan page for your business instead of a personal friend page;

• Unlimited Fans
• Create HTML Tabs and graphics to make your site more customized
• Create specific events just for the business
• Create a direct URL, example: www.facebook.com/myclubcrawler
• Can send direct messages to all fans

Here are some examples of sites we have developed for our clients.

• www.facebook.com/tiltedkiltdowntownchicago
• www.facebook.com/fuggedabouditclub
• www.facebook.com/atlantisclub
• www.facebook.com/tavernatthepark
• www.facebook.com/napervillemomsnetwork
• www.facebook.com/lattnerentertainment

You can also contact us direct for a free consultation or click here to learn what can be done with your Facebook fan page, how you can promote your sites and why a fan page is more beneficial for your followers.

If you should have any questions or need assistance in setting up a Fan page for your business.  You can contact me direct at mikej@crawlerpromotions.com.

Keep an eye out on Part two and three of this series as I will review additional competitor tactics being used against your sites and how to get into using basic social media skills to steal traffic from your competition.  All coming up in this three part series.

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