When it comes to marketing your business through social media, it’s all about engagement. It doesn’t matter if you have 30 followers, or 3,000, if those followers are engaged in what you’re doing then social media is worth your time. Once you’ve spent time increasing your Twitter followers, and building your Twitter profile foundation, it’s time to get your Twitter followers more engaged. For restaurants, a creative promotion to launch for your online community could be a Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest.
What is a Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest?
Very simply, restaurants can ask patrons to take a picture of their meal with their smart phone and tweet it on Twitter. In exchange for patrons taking the time to participate in your Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest you can offer them some sort of discount on their meal or a free dessert, etc. This Image Marketing tactic can go a long way towards driving new patrons to your restaurant.
Benefits of Running a Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest
Running online contests offer business owners numerous benefits. A Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest can be a lot of fun for your restaurant patrons, as well as, very beneficial for your business. If you’re looking for ways to do the following, then running a Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest might be a smart marketing tactic for your to take advantage of:
- Increase engagement from your online community
- Show patrons and prospective patrons (members of your local community) what dishes are on your menu
- Get pictures of your food in front of your local community
- Generate more new patrons for your restaurant
If you’re looking to achieve any or all of the goals above, you should run a Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest at your restaurant.
How to Set Up and Run a Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest
Here are the steps you should take when implementing a Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest:
- Set 2-3 goals for your contest
- Determine what you will ask restaurant patrons to do in order to participate
- Come up with an offer that you think is of enough value to entice your restaurant patrons to enter the contest
- Explain the contest to your servers so they can answer questions and provide any discounts or fulfill the offer
- Write a blog article or shoot a YouTube video explaining the rules of the contest and begin promoting it online
- Create an promo sheet that you can put into your menu for patrons to see when ordering
- Get started!
Running a Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest doesn’t have to be too complicated. With that said, if you don’t spend the proper time planning your contest, you’ll probably encounter more “bumps” during the contest than you need to. Simply take time to think through all aspects of running the contest, ask your servers and others for input, make sure everyone is on the same page as far as the rules and what’s required of patrons, and then simply get started. You can’t succeed if you don’t try. Running a fun contest like the Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest can go a long way to getting your current patrons more engaged in your brand, as well as, attract new patrons to your restaurant.
Restaurants Run Tweet and Eat Twitter Contests
As you continue to use social media tools like Twitter to promote your restaurant, build relationships with patrons, and drive sales, remember that there are many benefits to running Twitter Contests, like a Tweet & Eat Contest or ReTweet Contest. These online contests can be fun for patrons and beneficial for your restaurant. Would you ever consider running a Tweet & Eat Twitter Contest at your restaurant? Leave your comments below.
Knowing who unfollowed your small business on Twitter is important, but knowing why they unfollowed you is even more critical. Obviously you can’t find out the why without knowing the who. By using who.unfollowed.me you can get a list of all of the Twitter users who recently unfollowed you (hopefully it’s a short list). You can then begin to reach out to each of them via a reply tweet to explain that you noticed that they unfollowed you and you wanted to make sure you improved your Twitter presence, so you’d like to know why they made their decision.
Navigate to 
Social Media tools like Twitter allow small business to connect, and build real relationships with, their customers and prospects. Businesses that have success with Twitter use it in this way. Those who use Twitter as another microphone to shout their marketing message to followers usually don’t see results. By sending an Auto DM to a new follower you’re essentially shouting at him/her right off the bat. Many people don’t like being shouted at and this might entice that new follower to stop following your business on Twitter right away.
As our readers know, we are all about quality over quantity in all that we do here at Catalyst. Having a HIGH QUALITY online community is much more powerful than having a community of thousands who aren’t interested in what you’re doing. If you’re a small business that operates in a certain community, then you should be using local Twitter hashtags in your tweets. If you operate a local business then it’s assumed that your target audience is primarily the local community. By using local Twitter hashtags in your tweets you can get your information in front of your target audience. An example of a local Twitter hashtag for a business serving Philadelphia might be #Philadelphia or #Philly. You can even get down to the County and Town level. We are located in #Chalfont in #BucksCounty. Anyone following these hashtags will then see your tweets. Hopefully they find them valuable and decide to follow you. Now you have effectively turned someone you did not know into a new community member. Pretty powerful stuff!
Twitter Hashtags are made up of one or more words or abbreviations and appended to a tweet. You can recognize a Twitter Hashtag when you see the pound sign “#” directly attached to a word or group of words (with no spaces in between). Small Businesses should think of Twitter Hashtags the same way they would think of 
You can even schedule your ReTweets of others to go out in the future. If you are on Twitter and you’re reading a few great tweets, you don’t have to ReTweet them all at once, you can schedule them to go out throughout the day. This will provide you with a consistent stream of tweets without reverting to using some of the more automated Twitter software. There’s still a manual component and a personal touch involved when scheduling your tweets this way. 
Stay with me now… A few months back we wrote an article entitled, “Be Sure to Thank your ReTweeter”, and in the article we talked about how you can include your original tweet in your ‘Thank You’ tweet. Be sure to go read the full article, but basically here’s how it breaks down: 
With the above being said, be sure to tweet other content in between the times that the same tweet is going out. You don’t want someone coming to your Twitter profile 2 days later and seeing the same tweet posted 3 times. Once you tweet it for the first time, you can go ahead and tweet other content (examples might be your old content, ReTweet others, or even 
I guess it was about three weeks ago at this point, when we first heard about SCVNGR here at Catalyst. I read about the New England Patriots using SCVNGR to engage their fans during the “off-season” in the NFL. After a little research, it was clear that SCVNGR is onto something BIG for businesses. We went ahead and penned our first post on using 
Here at Catalyst Marketers, we were fans of SCVNGR before we started our relationship with them, now that they’ve engaged us, and taken an interest in what we do, we are HUGE advocates. Every time we write a blog post about SCVNGR or tweet about them to our followers, the SCVNGR brand grows. Who knows, perhaps we’ll even write our next eBook, in our Driving Growth for Your Small Business eBook Series, on SCVNGR. SCVNGR created a remarkable product, and they are now using online tools to help build relationships with early adopters, and drive growth – IT’S WORKING. Now, that’s the power of using online tools, like Twitter, to build your brand!
