Social media marketing is becoming increasingly crucial to the growth of businesses. This has become evident for our friends at Weslayan Café, a great little restaurant owned and operated by good people that serves tasty food that is close to Marion. They have recently asked their customers to partake in the social media scene by asking them to post reviews on many dining directories.

“To Our Loyal and Appreciated Customers:

We love having you here at Weslayan Café, and your continued support is what keeps our doors open; however, word of mouth, mail flyers, etc., don’t do much for business growth. The advent of smartphone growth and computer usage make dining ‘social networking’ not only a helpful but extremely powerful tool in increasing our customer base and subsequently being able to do things like add more variety to our menu, extend our hours, hire more employees to expedite order speed, etc.

That’s why we would love if you could take 10 minutes or so to take advantage of websites like citysearch.com, yelp.com, 29-95.com, or b4-u-eat.com to post reviews of our restaurant so others can hear about our great food!

Thanks,

Weslayan Café”

The obvious purpose of these sites is for current customers to share their opinions and experiences and for potential customers to see the reviews for a restaurant (or other products and services) and, hopefully, make a decision to dine there. Business owners also benefit from these sites. Much like comment cards, online review sites help businesses learn what their customers think about the products and services they receive and can use the reviews to improve many aspects of the businesses.

General directories, such as yelp and citysearch, provide reviews and information about businesses around various cities in different categories. Sites such as b4-u-eat.com and 29-95 are specifically targeted to restaurants and businesses in Houston. To get listed, businesses submit their information and usually pay a small fee. Because the directories verify the information, they are considered ‘authoritative’ in the eyes of the Google bots. However, since general interest directories like yelp hold a broad range of interests, they may not hold as much authority as the more specialized directories focusing on a narrower field of interest.

For more information on social media marketing for your company, contact The Marion Group at 713.623.6444 or email us at info2@marion.com.