Can we talk about social media in the corporate world?

999 out of every 1,000 businesses have a social media presence. Yes. Some businesses don’t engage that way. They are few and far between.

For the rest of us it’s a grab bag of how it’s executed.

At large corporations like Wendy’s who have funny and engaging posts they have a full time, 24 hour a day team, who monitors their feed.

Some businesses hire a professional marketing team to do this.

Some places rely on the internal marketing team to do social media.

Other businesses give it to a 22 year old intern and they post and monitor the feed.

Until this restaurant, I was responsible for the content. Coming up with content isn’t actually very hard. What’s hard is carving out the time to do it between writing schedules, budgets, meetings, payroll, inventory, invoicing, and actual day to day operations.

Also, unless you’ve hired a professional photographer, framing the photographs, with decent lighting, context and composition can take much longer than you have. There is a reason people get paid big bucks to photograph food.

And it’s a whole other issue if you want it to be funny, informative, and entertaining.

This is a long way of saying most businesses don’t have someone monitoring their feeds 24 hours a day.

Which is a long way of saying that if you need information, a reservation, have a billing problem, a gift card issue, a complaint, a compliment, etc it’s so much better to reach out to the restaurant directly.

I have had instances where you check your messages and discover someone sent you a message two weeks ago.

It’s really bad when the message was time sensitive.

So for the person who left the message this week about a gift card issue. The outcome was we messaged you back to say call the restaurant so we can discuss the problem with you.

So if you’d called to begin with you’d already have a solution.