Final Project

LongHorn Steakhouse -- Monitoring Part II

According to my continuous monitoring on LongHorn Steakhouse, it seems like LongHorn Steakhouse is prepared well for dealing with its groundswell from the beginning on Facebook. It has been not only actively listen to, talk with, and support its groundswell on every single comment like a real person, but also participate on other Facebook users' posts, which has relevant message. Also, It is great to see that it has four Facebook accounts with different purposes both focusing on its inner and outer groundswell; they are about LongHorn Steakhouse, its coupons, its employees, and its highlights. From its engagement on Facebook, I can see it totally follows Li and Bernoff's seven suggestions, "never forget that the groundswell is about person-to-person activity; be a good listener; be patient; be opportunistic; be flexible; be collaborative; be humble."

Besides, from the monitoring tool, Socialbakers, I discovered that LongHorn Steakhouse has a astonishing fans increasing period on Facebook after Feb. 22. From my last blog on LongHorn until now, it has gained more than 200,000 likes! When I kept looking for the reasons, I found that there have been launched two events and one campaign in sequence that significantlly tapped its groundswell during this period.

Two events
1. The event on Feb. 18th, "FREE Appetizer or Dessert with Purchase of Two Adult Dinner Entrées- up to $9.49 value!" gained 24,156 likes, 1,837 comments, and 12,370 shares.

2. The event on Mar. 5th, "Which LongHorn® Steak are you? Take our personality quiz & find out!" gained 21,139 likes, 7,819 comments, and 2,465 shares. It makes the relationship between customers and its steak closer by doing a quiz to find out what type of steak their personalities belong to.

3. The campaign, "OUR NAME'S AT STEAK," surged its membership in its Hospitality Club with a Facebook Caption Contest giving fans the power to rename it!  Fans can submit a name with up to five words for a chance at winning a $250 LongHorn gift card. Contests like this aroused competition and creativity while achieving email acquisition.

Furthermore, one thing happy to see is that LongHorn has recently opened a new Twitter Account, which means that this organization has realized potential groundswell on Twitter as I mentioned in previous blog. However, there has not been seeing any tweets on its new Twitter account yet.

Recommendation
Through my monitoring, LongHorn on Facebook has already been a great example for us and knowing its role, but other social media have not been fully used. Thus, I would definitely skip Fackbook and add some more recommendations in order to further its step on tapping its groundswell.

1. Target audience

Previous finding from Alexa and Facebook Likes shows that LongHorn Steakhouse’s official website audience is primarily female with some college education at home in the United States. Also, its Facebook likes are usually from age 35-44 years old. Thus, LongHorn Steakhouse should pay attention to its primary target audience on its marketing.

2. Timing

According to Google Trends, interests on LongHorn Steakhouse maintain a stable trend that the interests reaching peaks once a year during winter times since 2010. We know the importance of word of mouse, LongHorn should catch the opportunities on its marketing when the most people are talking it.

3. Official website
I do find a surprising point on it that its official website launched some training videos with grilling tips and recipes, but this videos are not connected to its YouTube channel, which means that it is not easy to find these videos except browsing its website. So, I would highly recommend that LongHorn also post these videos on its YouTube channel. Also, since LongHorn has been started using various social media, it should add more social media link on its official website.


4. YouTube

It is necessary for LongHorn Steakhouse to actively update its YouTube channel and do better SEO since we can see a lot of active audience on there. In addition, due to the fact that there is no avaliable space for comments, I would suggest that LongHorn could further its step on YouTube to be a good listener. A great model from Pizza Hut can illustrate this point well.

5. Instagram or Flickr

It is better to create an official account either on Instagram or Flickr to show its delicious food and gain more customers to its restaurants. Also, we can see that a large number of people expecting more engagement on Instagram.

6. Twitter

It is crucial for LongHorn to update more photos and videos on Twitter in order to attract people's attention and get rid of boring tweets. Therefore, LongHorn will probable turn its situation around on its new Twitter account. A great example on Twitter in the same industry would be McDonald's.