Rex Hammock recently wrote a blog post about website strategy for Independent Schools which contained some excellent insights about the web ecosystem that seem particularly relevant to restaurants.
The title of the post is Your Web Strategy is Not Your Website Strategy which captures a core belief of Serving Social™ that having your own website is important but the internet is a “place,” and like in the real-world, it’s not always the best strategy to stay inside your own four-walls if you’re wanting to communicate with others. It is better to also be in those places wherever your “community” can be found. The best “social places” on the web provide you with ways to publish content on your site and theirs simultaneously — so using those sites is not duplicating efforts, but providing ways to be several places at the same time.
In other words, you need to have your own site and you need to be on the other social platforms where your customers are. Rex specifically mentioned Posterous and Tumblr for their ability to automatically publish content on multiple channels simultaneously. Of course you can enable this through various applications such as Friend Feed and Networked Blogs among others but Posterous and Tumblr with their easy interfaces and media-rich features do so much more.
Read Read Web calls them “light” blogging platforms and so they offer the ability to say a little bit more than a Tweet and a little less than a blog post and can easily showcase in photo, video and/or tone of voice your atmosphere, spectacular desserts, fun crowd, or friendly servers. Each of them offer a variety of features for posting including mobile, though you can use email to post just about anything to Posterous which puts it in just about anyone’s daily routine. Both of them make it easy to grab content from the web for posting….someone posts a photo of their dinner at your restaurant and you can grab it and share with a Posterous or Tumblr bookmarklet right from your browser.
Which one should you use? Mashable has a post that goes through the virtues of each but as always it depends upon which one makes the most sense for you. The overall benefit of adding one of them to your social menu is as a way to introduce yourself to customers in several places at the same time. Does the post from email seem easier for you? Consider Posterous. Does Tumblr’s design seem more natural to you? You can’t go wrong with Tumblr. Think of these platforms as an exclamation point for your restaurant!
Laurence Borel give us 10 reasons why she likes Posterous better than Tumblr while Business Insider thinks Tumblr has the edge. What do you think? Join ServingSocial™ on Posterous.
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