Creating Facebook Fans: What Happened at Cafe Yumm

Cafe Yumm is a fast casual restaurant in the Pacific Northwest. The Cafe has a very active Facebook fan page and Twitter feed. We spoke with their marketing director, Kelli Matthews, about the growth. Sterling Lentz: Have you noticed a pattern in the growth of say your Facebook fans? And l what events spike growth? Kelli M: It was mostly registering for an account that spiked the most growth. We grew in the first month: it went from three people (wo of them being me) and I think it was the first month we were at 1,500. An d at the end of the second month it was 3,500. And it’s plateaued a little bit since then. It’s about 3,700 or 3,800 right now. But I would log in every day and just be astounded at the numbers. As kind of a side note, we started the page just when Facebook let you do custom URLs and we had to have 1,000 fans to get a custom URL. And so we were thinking well, let’s encourage people to sign up and we’ll kind of push this.. And a couple of days before the deadline that we could get our custom URL we hit 1,000 and I think by the deadline we were over 1,500. It was just like that really didn’t need so much attention but that’s great. Interestingly, we didn’t see a ton of spike like around the Cedar Hills promotion, for example, the tasting things in Portland. A little bit around Beaverton but not a huge spike. I think we’ve kind of plateaued. I’m not sure I would expect continued huge growth from above about 4,000. Sterling L: Did you start the growth by going through your friends list and inviting all of your friends to join? Kelli M: I think I tweeted it to my friends on my personal Twitter account and I think that was about it. So we put it on the Café Yumm Twitter account. So that was about it. It was a really quick adoption rate. It was kind of surprising.

Bloglites

Retailer Stories

Action Guides

Book Excerpts

Member Comments

"word of mouth spread offline is more positive and more likely to be interpreted as credible than wom spread online, according to a recent research study from womma member company the keller fay group. fifty-nine percent of those surveyed indicted they found wom transmitted face-to-face and on the phone was "highly" credible, versus 49% for online wom. the study also found that 66% of face-to-face wom communication was "mostly positive" versus 57% of the impressions on blogs and chat rooms. offline wom was also found to be 7% more likely to lead to purchase intent, according to the research." marsha t., advertising agency, baton rouge. la.

“we use newsletters to get information from our customers. have a poll or a survey. it can be short, and even fun: where are you going on vacation? what tv show are you enjoying this summer? then post results in a future newsletter. people love taking polls.of course, always best to use a poll topic that is of interest to your audience.our customers are into new bands, especially hip-hop. we like to poll about "who's hot" in order to let them chime in about their favorites, and it also let's us get a sense of trends.”anson l , natchez, miss clothing store

Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.