Strategies for monitoring social media for small restaurants

ABSTRACT

Recently, social media has emerged as a relatively low-cost option for all restaurants that offers more opportunities for monitoring performance than traditional types of media. To date, social media research related to restaurants has often emphasized how to implement social media as a promotional tool and communication device and has focused on larger, chain restaurants or on the consumer perspective. In this study, we apply the resource-based view theory to specifically explore the managerial side of monitoring social media in small restaurants by interviewing people in charge of it. We interviewed eighteen restaurants and specifically asked them about their challenges and successes of using social media as a monitoring tool to explore how they can better utilize social media. We discovered that due to an array of challenges, most small restaurants underutilize social media as a monitoring device in their operations. We suggest ways this can be addressed even with the limited resources small restaurants may have.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• small restaurants
• online marketing
• social media monitoring