Today we published a new report about Instagram photos taken by restaurant customers and tagged explicitly to the locations of 63 brands across all of Q1. The report ranks these restaurant brands in three categories:

1. Total Instagram photos taken and place-tagged across all locations of the brand
2. Average number of Instagram photos per location for each brand
3. Instagram photos as a percentage of check-ins (Facebook and Foursquare combined) for each brand

The Cheesecake Factory was the overall winner, but several other brands did well too. Below are the top three brands in each category.

Total Number of Instagram Photos:

Average Number of Instagram Photos per Location:

Instagram Photos as a Percentage of Check-Ins:

Starbucks naturally won in terms of total photos, but interestingly, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf did significantly better both in terms of average number of photos per location (2X) and photos as a percentage of check-ins (3X). Dave & Buster’s had the highest average of photos per location in the quarter while In-N-Out won in photos as a percentage of check-ins. BJs and Hard Rock Café received honorable mentions based on how they did well overall.

Instagram has proven to be a powerful way for customers to create compelling content around the brand experiences they’re passionate about, such as exciting restaurant visits. And for the restaurant brands, these customer photos represent authentic, locally relevant content that can be shared with other fans, for example through the local Facebook page for where the photo was taken. This is something MomentFeed enables through LocalVoice.

Download the full report here: MomentFeed Index: Restaurant Instagram Report Q1 2013

The post MomentFeed Publishes Restaurant Instagram Report for Q1 2013 appeared first on MomentFeed.

Local search has been a “thing” for more than a decade. It started as a basic utility—needing to find a place and get directions—that consumers accessed through PCs. It often ended with printing out directions, which was the local-search equivalent of dial-up Internet service. These days, consumers predominantly use their mobile devices to search locally and generate turn-by-turn directions. And it’s having a disruptive effect on many of the first-generation local-search players.

According to a recent comScore study, more than 113 million consumers used a mobile device to search locally in December, 2012. This is a dramatic shift in behavior and attention from just a couple years ago. Simultaneously, local search is now being influenced by social connections on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, and Google+. Indeed, local search is quickly becoming a social activity.

One of the more surprising revelations from the comScore study is that Facebook is now the #2 mobile app for local search behind Google Maps. This puts it ahead of Mapquest, Bing, and Apple Maps. Yelp isn’t even in the top five.

Are people really using Facebook for local search? This may seem counterintuitive to some, but consider that Facebook is by far the most popular mobile app in the world. Roughly half-a-billion people use Facebook mobile apps an average of 400+ minutes per month. Local pages alone generate 645 million page views per month. With that level of scale, it’s not surprising that consumers are using local search features like Nearby in very large numbers.

Just as Google wants to become more social through its effort to build out Google+, Facebook wants to integrate search to its core value proposition and, eventually, to its advertising products. While Facebook has quietly established itself as a top local search player, Graph Search is aimed squarely at Google’s bread and butter. This isn’t to suggest that Facebook seeks to replace Google search, much in the same way Google can never hope to replace Facebook’s social graph. But it comes down to competition in three key areas:

1. Mindshare with consumers

2. Making their services that much more valuable for users

3. Increasing ad dollars

After all, Google search is better with a social layer and Facebook’s social graph can make search results that much more relevant and useful. It’s a win for everyone including brands.

When looking at how consumers are using social networks for local search, however, Facebook is leading by large margins over Google+ and others. This is important because the value of local search for brands extends beyond the basic utility of locating the business. Social networks not only provide personalized recommendation engines—showing places your friends like—but also a social amplifier. When a consumer finds a place, they can share that brand experience through contextualized status updates, check-ins, likes, recommendations, photos, and videos. These engagements—these customer moments—generate value in two fundamental ways: (1) they provide the data that powers personalized recommendation engines such as Graph Search and Foursquare Explore and (2) they generate tremendous earned media value. This is word-of-mouth at scale, and the following case study illustrates its true magnitude at the local level.

This national restaurant chain has 1,200 locations and more than three million fans on its Facebook brand page. Nearly all of its social marketing resources are invested at the brand level through creating and posting content. There are 1,200 corresponding Facebook local pages, but aside from being optimized via PinSync, these pages receive no content from the brand. They are not actively managed in any way.

During the month of January, the brand page generated more than 500,000 engagements in the form of likes, comments, and shares of the content the brand posted. None of this was promoted using paid media, so it was entirely organic i.e. what you get when you post content to the page. These 500,000 engagements generated 21.1 million impressions, per their Facebook Insights.

Meanwhile, the 1,200 local pages received 107,882 engagements in the form of check-ins, place tags, photos, and recommendations. These generated 31.7 million impressions or 50% more than the brand page. At MomentFeed, we are able to uniquely measure this because we roll up the Facebook Insights for each location. Otherwise, you’d have to go to each page individually for these data.

There are several key takeaways from this simple study:

1. It is critical for multi-location brands to optimize their local pages not only for search but also engagement, which increases social discovery.

2. Consumer-generated stories about a brand (check-ins, photos) are more efficient in the Facebook News Feed than brand-generated stories. In other words, it takes fewer customer check-ins to generate the same number of impressions and value as brand content.

3. Investing resources at the local level will yield higher returns than at the national (brand) level. In other words, it’s much easier to move the needle at the local level, whereas increased investment to a mature brand page ultimately has diminishing returns.

4. Posting content to local pages is pure upside in terms of customer reach and value.

5. Local search, mobile, and social are converging in ways that generate exponential value for brands and consumers alike.

As an industry, we’ve been talking about the convergence of social, local, and mobile aka SoLoMo for the past couple years. Foursquare was the first to truly nail this dynamic. Now, the behemoths of Facebook and Google are not only catching up but bringing tremendous scale with them. The true promise of SoLoMo is just now being realized. And it starts with local search.

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In fact, a local listing with no address or phone number can still be quite effective with a good lat/long. Why? Because lat/long is the only data point that computers use for navigation – for getting you from point A to point B. And by computers I mean PCs, navigation systems, and smartphones. These are the tools we use to locate places like restaurants and hotels, and the only piece of data these computers use is the lat/long.

In other words, when you search a store finder or Google Maps for the nearest Starbucks location on your iPhone and ask for directions, that command comes down to a request to take you from one lat/long to another lat/long – from your current lat/long, per the GPS in your phone, to the lat/long associated with that Starbucks location. The phone doesn’t use or recognize the street address. It only sees the lat/long.

The challenge is that lat/long inaccuracy is a large, systemic problem for all multi-location brands. It starts with bad internal data (store finders) and gets perpetuated through so many third parties including Google, Facebook, Foursquare, and others. How was this problem created? There are three main culprits:

1. The sources brands use to generate lat/longs for their addresses are unreliable (I won’t name names)
2. There is no easy way to verify lat/long accuracy, so brands take them on faith
3. Third parties assume data from brands is authoritative and don’t take steps to verify its accuracy

This will be the topic of an upcoming webinar, as MomentFeed is the only platform that permanently solves for lat/long accuracy on a universal basis.

The post So Wrong Like a Bad Lat/Long appeared first on MomentFeed.

We recently announced that 7-Eleven, JCPenney, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf®, and The Home Depot have all selected the MomentFeed platform to power their social marketing efforts at the local level.

ClickZ, Mobile Marketer, and Retail TouchPoints all posted some great pieces around this news.

In addition to providing local publishing and CRM tools that drive brand awareness and advocacy and increase customer response rates, MomentFeed removes a significant barrier to social-mobile customer engagement for all clients by correcting inaccurate geocodes (lat/long) and merging unauthorized duplicates on Facebook, Foursquare, and Google through its proprietary PinSync process.

“Managing our location data to minimize friction for customers is a huge priority for us,” said Patrice Anderson, Director of eCommerce and Social Media at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf®. “With social channels now creating opportunities at the local level, geocode accuracy is more important than ever to make sure our customers can find us right away instead of creating unauthorized duplicates. MomentFeed’s PinSync process ensures the location data accuracy we need.”

Beyond PinSync, the MomentFeed platform provides an integrated solution for large multi-location brands to manage Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Instagram, and Twitter at the local level. Unlike traditional social media marketing solutions, MomentFeed starts with the client’s physical locations and provides the tools to manage all virtual manifestations of these physical assets and the corresponding customer engagement.

“We are always looking for new ways to maximize relevance in our customer communications,” said Danielle Ivey, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing at 7-Eleven. “Given our different guest needs we serve based on different local markets, publishing content accordingly through location-based channels like Facebook Place pages and engaging directly with our guests is a tremendous opportunity for us. The MomentFeed platform enables this at scale.”

Changes in social media – like the introduction of Facebook Graph Search and Google+ Local – and the explosion of mobile discovery – such as Facebook Nearby, Google Maps, and Apple Maps – have made it critical for brick-and-mortar brands to start managing social at the local level. Brands will not be able to ignore this in the long run, as they will lose business when people are not able to find their locations and engage with them.

“What we are hearing from our clients is that they have not found any solutions to their location data issues other than PinSync,” said MomentFeed Founder and CEO Rob Reed. “We are proud to solve a real problem for these forward-leaning brands as well as giving them the tools to maximize social-mobile engagement and reach their customers efficiently based on location.”

The post Innovative Brands Tap MomentFeed to Unlock the Value of Local Marketing appeared first on MomentFeed.

As the first of its kind, the report ranks 30 top restaurant brands in three categories: (1) total Instagram photos taken and place-tagged across all locations of the brand, (2) average number of Instagram photos per location for each brand, and (3) Instagram photos as a percentage of check-ins (Facebook and Foursquare combined) for each brand.

Total Number of Instagram Photos:

Top 3

Average Number of Instagram Photos per Location:

Top 3

Instagram Photos as a Percentage of Check-Ins:

Top 3

The Cheesecake Factory was the overall winner, but it’s worth noting the top brands in the third category. Because of the strong correlation between check-ins and sales for restaurants, a look at photos as a percentage of check-ins gives us an idea of how many of each restaurant’s customers take Instagram photos there. The brands that are not in the top of this category can use promotions such as Instagram contests and other incentives to increase photo-taking at their locations.

Instagram is a powerful way for customers to create compelling content around the brand experiences they’re passionate about, such as exciting restaurant visits. And for the restaurant brands, these customer photos represent authentic, locally relevant content that should be shared with other fans, ideally through the local Facebook page for where the photo was taken. This is something the MomentFeed platform offers through its publishing features.

The post New Restaurant Social Media Report from MomentFeed: Instagram Front-Runners for 2013 appeared first on MomentFeed.

Multi-location brands have historically been focused on their corporate Facebook brand page. But these brands do business on the local level, their customers are local, and over the past year, Facebook has continued to give local pages a greater voice on the social graph. And now with Graph Search, these local pages are more likely to surface than ever before.

One of the main challenges associated with local Facebook pages is data accuracy: The geocode (lat/long) is often incorrect, there are unauthorized duplicate versions of the pages created by consumers on their smartphones who cannot find the registered page, and address information and branding may be off. Graph Search Optimization is about correcting all these inaccuracies for the best possible search results, engagement, and discovery. MomentFeed offers this service through PinSync, a proprietary process that optimizes all aspects of local pages.

It’s not uncommon for restaurant, retail, or hospitality brands to have inaccuracies and unauthorized duplicates for as many as half of their local pages. In fact, it’s a significant problem for all multi-location brands. But on the flip side, solving these issues creates a competitive advantage for the brands that decide to invest in it. The growing exposure of local pages will make it obvious which brands are taking their Facebook presence seriously.

Graph Search lets consumers search for great places to shop, eat, stay, etc., all based on social connections. Meaningful results are naturally more likely to be stores and restaurants in specific locations than some sort of corporate brand page. Which is why an unauthorized duplicate page with incorrect information about the address and/or business hours is a lost opportunity for brands that live and die by the number of people that leave money in cash registers across their actual locations.

At MomentFeed we see Graph Search Optimization as a critical agenda item for multi-location brands in 2013. It starts by registering and claiming local Facebook pages under the Parent-Child relationship. Then the pages must be updated with accurate geocodes, categorization, and contact details. And finally, unauthorized duplicate pages must be identified for each location and merged with the registered pages. This is an ongoing effort, an effort we are extremely passionate about.

The post Graph Search Optimization: How It Works for Multi-Location Brands appeared first on MomentFeed.

As a MomentFeed client, your locations are claimed and optimized for “search, engagement, and discovery” via PinSync, which gives you a competitive advantage. How? Because Facebook just announced a major update to its mobile apps that puts local “search, engagement, and discovery” at the center of the mobile experience…at the center of the most popular mobile app on the planet.

According to Facebook, its updated Nearby tab “helps people discover places near them based on their friends’ recommendations. People can explore by category (ex: restaurants or hotels); connect to businesses directly from their phone (by liking, checking in, calling, or getting directions); rate the places they visit via a five-star system; and share their recommendations with friends.”

Of course, in order for this to work, those places need to be claimed and managed with proper branding and accurate metadata including the all-important lat/long (geocode). Naturally, the popular places i.e. those with the most customer engagement will rise to the top.

Also on the horizon, according to The Wall Street Journal, is a partnership between Apple and Foursquare for Apple Maps/iOS integration. “The discussions with New York-based Foursquare come as Apple has been talking to a number of companies that collect local data to improve its new mapping product. Foursquare has amassed business listings and collects data about the relative popularity of places as well as user-generated tips about them that could help Apple’s mapping service stand out.”

All of which points to local optimization on these platforms as a strategic imperative for any brick-and-mortar brand. So here’s to our clients! Thank you for sharing in our vision and for leading the way into 2013!

- Rob Reed, Founder & CEO, MomentFeed

The post To Our Clients appeared first on MomentFeed.

Today we published the findings of a case study showing how Texas Roadhouse increased social-mobile customer engagement substantially across its 390+ U.S. locations over a three-month period. Using the MomentFeed platform, the restaurant chain experienced a boost in performance across all major Facebook KPIs for their local restaurant pages, including an increase in unique organic impressions of 145 percent. The full case study is available here.

The post Texas Roadhouse Increases Customer Engagement and Performance Across Major Facebook KPIs appeared first on MomentFeed.

The fundamental considerations for marketers are the “how” and “where” of social engagement. In other words, how is the customer engaging with my brand? And where are they at that critical moment? By answering these questions, brands can make the best possible decisions with regard to their social marketing strategies.

How customers engage is important because platforms and devices matter. Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Instagram offer unique value propositions for consumers and marketers alike. Engagement value can vary significantly within each platform as well as across them. The more stark distinction is between devices. PCs and smartphones are fundamentally different paradigms, especially as marketing vehicles. An engaged consumer on a smartphone is significantly more valuable than the same consumer on a PC.

Which brings us to the “where” of social engagement. Is the consumer at home sitting in front of their computer, where location is largely irrelevant, or are they in a retail shopping environment using their smartphone, where location offers crucial context? The latter is infinitely more valuable for any brand that sells products and services in the physical world, not the least of which is its proximity to the point of sale.

This essential “how” and “where” of social engagement is what we mean by a social marketing platform built for the mobile paradigm. By optimizing for the how and where of smartphone engagement, MomentFeed offers the best of both worlds because there is a significant spillover effect to PCs. This is distinct from PC-first social marketing platforms that are built for consumers at home on their computers, where there is very little spillover to mobile.

The post On Being the First Social Marketing Platform for Mobile appeared first on MomentFeed.

Today, we published the results of a contest that increased social-mobile customer engagement with minimal effort from the brand. Barney’s Beanery ran a two-week photo contest across all its locations that was promoted through their social channels. The restaurant chain used MomentFeed to measure the effectiveness of the promotion as well as to publish the best photos to their corresponding Facebook place pages throughout the contest and beyond.

The main metric for the contest was Instagram and foursquare photos combined as a percentage of Facebook and foursquare check-ins combined, effectively measuring photos relative to foot traffic. This engagement was also measured during four-week periods both before and after the contest. During the contest, the number of photos as a percentage of check-ins increased 66 percent. Even after the contest, this specific photo engagement was 59 percent higher than before the contest, showing that the promotion had a lasting impact.

“The increase in engagement certainly made this contest a success for us, but what really stood out was realizing what we can accomplish when we get our arms around all the main social-mobile platforms that our customers use every day,” said AJ Sacher, Regional Manager at Barney’s Beanery. “With MomentFeed, we were able to understand the engagement at our locations from Facebook, foursquare, Instagram, and Twitter and measure the effectiveness of our promotion. We’ll definitely be doing more of this.”

Barney’s Beanery offered three prizes for each of its locations; first prize was a $100 gift card and a reserved table during the NBA Finals, second prize was a $50 gift card, and third prize was a branded t-shirt. At a relatively low cost and with minimal effort, Barney’s Beanery was able to impact customer engagement at the local level. Customer-generated content like photos represent earned media that was leveraged across the brand’s owned media channels, their Facebook place pages.

“This is an excellent example of what brands get in return for signaling to their customers that they are listening and for acknowledging their customers’ engagement,” said MomentFeed founder and CEO Rob Reed. “Barney’s Beanery effectively changed customer behavior with this contest and their publishing of photos to Facebook. These efforts have a lasting impact beyond a promotion.”

Click here to view the full case study.

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