Your restaurant is doing the social media thing. From Twitter to Facebook to Foursquare and back again, it has become overwhelming and, as the fans and followers start coming in, the posts start to pile up. Your restaurant needs assistance managing all this information, and you need it at a low cost. That being said, actually posting effective information and running promotions will require the assistance of a restaurant marketing firm. Fans and followers will ignore your restaurant if posts/tweets are not interesting, well-timed, consistent and brand-conscious.
Some restaurants chose to go it alone anyway, even though it takes time to manage social media no matter how well-organized. For those, thankfully, programs are available that organize and condense all the information flowing through every the myriad of social media sources, and do it for free. Everything imaginable can be pulled together in one dashboard. At this time, we will discuss the dominant player, TweetDeck. It is both the most aesthetically pleasing and the most popular dashboard application as well as a step ahead of the competition.
Although it has a pleasing desktop interface—built on the advanced Adobe AIR platform, it is easy to use and works on multiple operating systems (Apple OS, Linux, and Windows). Additionally, you don’t have to clog your smart phone with apps of all the different social media. Instead, TweetDeck has an application for Android and the iPhone, allowing you to stay current with what happens in the social media world.
TweetDeck also lets you customize whose posts you see, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or any other social media. With that in mind, you should set up a kind of hierarchy so you can tell what is important and what is noise. Accordingly, the dashboard is broken into customizable columns. It allows you to organize these columns in various ways including by who makes a post and whether it’s a message directed to you. Everyone has a recommended system. See what works for your restaurant. Ask yourself who and where do you receive important posts from. You can mark when you have read so you can clean up the inevitable clutter that comes with the deluge of social media.
The full roster of social media that Tweetdeck handles is Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare and Myspace. This wide range allows a restaurant to spread their social media net wider without taking on significantly more work—more than you would normally. In the future, TweetDeck hopefully will incorporate even more pertinent information that can help in running a business. Monitoring the web is a crushing task and should not be limited to social media nor only your accounts. In particular, we hope that Yelp will find its way into TweetDeck so that restaurant owners can track what is being said about them. Overall, TweetDeck is incredibly useful for restaurants.