It’s always been a reason to explore new culture, delicious food. Longhorn Steakhouse, as one of the most popular steak
restaurants in America, has always occupied my Friday night. Over 30 years,
LongHorn Steakhouse has more than 400 restaurants in over 35 states with its
great reputation on steaks that are always fresh, never frozen. So far, the
main active channel of social media used to tap its groundswell is Facebook.
About LongHorn Steakhouse
In 1981, George McKerrow, Jr. opened his very first
“LongHorn Steaks Restaurant & Saloon” in Atlanta, Georgia. Since there was
little success at the beginning, this restaurant struggled financially.
Fortunately, a sudden snowstorm provided a chance for LongHorn to be
successful. The snow forced motorists (including a food critic) towards one of
the only hospitable places nearby, LongHorn. Thereafter, the restaurant gained
recognition through word of mouth and started to be stronger and stronger until today’s
LongHorn Steakhouse.
In August 2007, LongHorn Steakhouse was acquired by DardenRestaurants, Inc, which also owns Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, etc.
To monitor and analysis how LongHorn Steakhouse performed on its social media, I used Alexa, Social Mention, Addictomatic and Google Trends to gain some insights. Also, I list some social media that LongHorn has been using so far.
It creates its official website with a western/Texan theme and contains detailed menu, training videos with grilling tips and recipes, gift cards purchasing, and club joining page which probably be a way to involve email marketing.
On the official website, it only linked to Facebook. As a suggestion, the website needs more social media links button. LongHorn Steakhouse does well on Facebook, which created its Facebook page in June 24, 2009, and gained 808,217 likes so far. It actively engages with its customers on Facebook by posting interesting topics, food photos and videos to energize its groundswell, as well as listening to and talking with its customers actively. 
It has its own channel on Youtube, but looks like the channel was just created recently with only few of videos on it. Also, it is not easy to find its official Youtube page since there are so many videos from others, which can tell a great amount of potentials on Youtube they missed. Also, it is highly recommended that LongHorn should do better SEO on Youtube channel. After looking at its videos on both official website and Youtube, there is no available space for comments, which means that LongHorn is not using this way to listen to its groundswell. 
LongHorn does not gain a lot on Twitter. It has been launched campaign called "Live At LongHorn" on Twitter since 2009, but with not much involvement that only 1,332 followers versus 1,025 following, LongHorn stopped tweets in 2011.
Analytical Data Observations
According to my monitoring on LongHorn Steakhouse from Alexa, I found that its official website audience is primarily female with some college education at home in the United States. Also, from Facebook likes, I found that its likes are usually from age 35-44 years old.
From Addictomatic, I found that people are talking LongHorn Steakhouse on various social media, such as Wordpress, Friendfeed, Youtube, Flickr, etc. There is not much interaction with LongHorn official page on Tweet; however, I do find numerous tweets talking about LongHorn. As a result, its audiences would probably feel that they are not supported well.
Social Mention, strength is the likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media; sentiment is the ratio of mentions that are generally positive to those that are generally negative; passion is a measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly; reach is a measure of the range of influence. From the charts below, it seems like LongHorn is doing good. After keeping looking at some negative mentions, I find that they are actually negative words telling positive feeling. They are unreal.
From Google Trends, one can clearly see that people's interests on LongHorn Steakhouse have been continuous increased after 2010, and there is no campaign influenced a lot during the interests reaching peaks every year. So, the waves shows below in every year could be probably understood that people prefer to stay in a warm restaurant with hot steaks in winter rather than that in summer time.
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