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Qdoba Finds 'Tweet' Success With Social Media

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Sep 26, 2009 7:38 am US/Mountain

Qdoba Finds 'Tweet' Success With Social Media

Reporting
Molly Hughes

DENVER (Denver Business Journal) ―

Click to enlarge 1 of 1: Customers at Qdoba Mexican Grill bring in printouts of a discount offer they received via an online network.
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Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are quickly becoming hot spots to look for deals, discounts and freebies from your favorite restaurants and retailers. And local business owners and marketers are benefitting as well from an instant connection to customers.

One example is the Qdoba Mexican Grill at 15th and Market streets in Denver, which recently sent out a message offering a free order of its "Street Tacos" to Facebook and Twitter followers who came to the restaurant during lunch hour. All customers had to do was print out the post or whip out their PDAs and show the post to the cashier.

The Market Street Qdoba's taco offer quickly went viral. Within an hour of the post, nearly 20 Qdoba followers on Twitter had reposted the "tweet" to their followers.

So, even though Qdoba originally sent out the tweet to about 3,000 followers, the message soon reached thousands more.

In addition to the obvious benefit of driving traffic into the store, the upside for Qdoba is that it can spread the word about a new menu item to an audience that's already shown interest in its food.

Doug Thielen, manager of Non-Traditional Marketing for Qdoba, says another benefit is the instant feedback he gets from customers. While he was at the Market Street location on Tuesday, he stood with his PDA watching his "free taco offer" on Facebook and Twitter go viral.

When Qdoba tests new menu items Thielen checks Facebook and Twitter to see what their fans and followers are saying.

"We've even tweaked recipes and added menu items based on feedback we've gotten from fans on Facebook and Twitter," Thielen says. "We recently put out a tweet saying, 'Hey guys what would you like to see new on the Qdoba menu?' and within 10 minutes we had 170 suggestions about what they want to see on the menu."

"We're using social media sites for marketing because we're finding that's where our customers are. Right now 86 percent of the Qdoba fans on Facebook are within what we call our demographic wheel house," Theilen said.

The young marketing manager told CBS4's Molly Hughes "we us social networking sites as a way to engage, educate and communicate with our followers."

And it appears to be working.

Qdoba started using Facebook and Twitter less than four months ago, and already it has nearly 30,000 fans on Facebook and 3,000 followers on Twitter.

For the consumer, the deals, discounts and freebies seem endless.

CBS4's Molly Hughes found everything from free furniture to a free cup of coffee at Dazbog when she was researching for her story. She found the best way to get deals at your favorite retailers is to do a search for those companies on Facebook and Twitter.

You "click" to become a fan or follower and you'll automatically get notices when they post a deal on their Facebook or Twitter pages. If you're a retailer or business owner, you may want to take some tips from your kids and set up a Facebook or Twitter page.

With millions of people actively surfing these sites every day, it'd be hard to find a better marketing tool that's free and narrowly targets the people you are trying to reach. Just ask Doug Thielen from Qdoba. He'll tell you tweeting is NOT for the birds.

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