One of the great things about social media and inbound marketing is the way it can build loyalty in ways traditional marketing and PR just can’t. It’s one thing to say you care about your customers — it’s another to demonstrate it every day on Facebook and Twitter.

Case in point is Boloco, a chain of burritos-n-more stores based in Boston. Started in 1997, Beloco has 17 locations in Boston and New England. Beloco’s home page is probably one of the best small company home pages I’ve ever seen; it is a masterpiece of simplicity. The site itself, however, is not simple — it is rich with information. It’s definitely worth a visit to see how a food business can do something unique and user friendly.

Boloco uses Facebook and Twitter to interact with customers, promote specific products, promote local charities and to reward loyalty in general. It does all of these very well.

On Twitter: Boloco has 3,732 followers and is listed by 300. The profile information says tweets are by the founder/CEO John Pepper and Boloco “mavens” (AKA other employees). Attaching a real-person name to a business Twitter account is always a good idea. I also love the full-screen-width photo they use a a background. A little high-quality photography goes a long way to making this Twitter account stand out.

What’s really interesting, though is how Boloco’s uses its Twitter account in a manner I classify as a “Reply Engine.”

Someone at Boloco is monitoring all the incoming tweets (@boloco messages) and probably any mentions of “Boloco” in anyone’s Tweets. Then … they reply to users. A lot. During a recent six-day period, their ratio of @ replies to promotional tweets was higher than 5:1 — for every tweet from them, there are 5 replies to customers. That’s probably the reverse ratio of most companies on Twitter.

And they are doing more than just saying “hi.” In some of the Tweets they are obviously responding to a complaining customer by adding “points” to their Boloco Cards (frequent visitor discount cards). How smart is that?

Their “promotional” tweets aren’t heavy handed either – they’ve tied a smoothie promotion with the Pan Mass Challenge, a charity bike ride for the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute. Beloco is donating 25 cents from every sale of their Cape Codder smoothie to a fund to give to riders.

On Facebook: Boloco has 4,538 fans on Facebook. Boloco uses Facebook as their goodwill embassador (while Twitter does the heavy lifting as a Reply Engine). Boloco does do some routine product promotion, too, but again it’s not too heavy handed.

A recent promotion shows how savvy they really are: In mid July Boloco began asking its Facebook page visitors and fans to “nominate” riders for an unofficial Boloco team for the Pan Mass Challenge bike-a-thon. Boloco then chose winners from those who got the most support. Boloco in turn is donating money to those riders (to help add to their pledge dollars). So they turned their Facebook page into a kind of nomination platform. This is a great way to both introduce people to the Boloco Facebook page and support a charity at the same time.

Here’s a snapshot from their Facebook on the PMC nomination winners:

Their Facebook does work as an advertising platform too. Boloco promotes its online and text ordering via a tab labeled “Bolocotogo” (see image above) and a banner ad. Here once again we find a clever use of a page built with FBML. This is just a repurposed graphic from their web page with links to online and text ordering. I hope everyone is getting the message that using FBML to make a custom page for your business Facebook account is something successful companies do.

And remember, all this clever social media usage stems from a place that sells burritos. So if they can do it, your retail/storefront businesses can do it too.

This entry was posted on July 27, 2010 at 12:07 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Facebook Stuff Getting it right Popular Posts Twitter Stuff by admin 2 Comments