A Bountiful, Utah steak restaurant called Mo’ Bettah Steaks has a simple web page but it has a lot of personality. Their web site is not fancy and it’s not search engine optimized. But front and center they invite you to become their friend on Facebook. And they encourage it at the restaurant too. This has paid off at a time when a lot of restaurants are hurting. They attribute 20-30% of their business to their Facebook presence. They’re planning to expand soon.

They have over 1,300 friends on Facebook which for a local business is great. They held a photo contest and gave away free food to the winners. That gave them a lot of photos to post. They also have two videos.

Another local restaurant Blue Lemon in Alpine made a group (don’t like the look as much) that has over 100 members. Local restaurants are natural fits for social media. Guru’s Cafe is on Twitter and Facebook but they don’t promote either on the home page of their web site. I haven’t been in for a while but it wasn’t mentioned at their restaurant that I could see.

When you do social media you need to integrate it into all of your marketing – and inside your store. The most successful marketing often is blending of many online and offline resources. There are so many tools (email, Twitter, Facebook, web site, blog, events, press releases, etc) to get the word out.

If you want to learn more about this, I’m part of Smart Media 2009 conference June 18-19 in Lindon, Utah. We’re looking for a Utah restaurant who wants to sponsor lunch for about 100 people. In return we’ll weave your restaurant into the training. That means we’ll create a Facebook Page for you (or a Twitter account) and show you how to market it. Contact me at grocerybike@gmail.com or the contact form on this blog if you’re interested.

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