Here I am at 3:38 PM on this Saturday afternoon in the middle of Beyond Bread in Tucson. I wanted to mention the company or the franchise owner on Twitter, but couldn’t find them. Instead, this was the only possible legitimate activity I’ve seen on Twitter from @BeyondBreadAZ:
I know it’s quite pretentious of me to expect every brand to be on Twitter, but this is beyond lame. It’s like the owner or someone in their marketing department only found the 27 seconds to create the Twitter account, but quickly forgotten all about it. It wasn’t too long ago, after all, the account’s creation date is December 1, 2010.
Honestly, at this point, if they don’t have the resources to even upload their logo or bother with talking with their customers, the best solution is to takedown the account and leave it at that. Otherwise, it’s only teasing your customers.
I’ll take a stab at what I would do with their Twitter account to make it, well, active:
- Upload the logo, URL and bio.
- Allow store managers access to Tweeting on it, give them CoTags.
- Publish the current specials every morning – unless they don’t change.
- Offer a daily question and the first response gets a prize (whereas prize = a free drink or sandwich)
- Answer questions from customers – invite feedback.
- Share witty, funny quotes – people love that.
- Encourage customers to follow Beyond Bread on Twitter at the cash register and on the door with window clings.
- Have the free wifi hotspot serve up a page with their Twitter & Facebook as the first landing page.
- Engage in discussion – not just talk about you – be a leader/guide to local activity and discussion.
- Partner with Bookman’s Speedway (right next door) with Twitter activity and community.
- Have no other rules or policies on Twitter for the employees except to be respectful and awesome.
- Take note of frequent customers and highlight awesome customers of the week on a blog.
- Encourage happy customers to leave a 5-star review on Yelp.
- Host friendly and fun Tweetups on nights when it’s slower. (Tucson’s Twitter community is slowly growing – they can be a leader of it.)
But surely, there is more anyone can do on Twitter. What would you do on Twitter if you ran the @BeyondBreadAZ account?
Even now, they should have a campaign to say “Do you Tweet?” Come Tweet for us!” and literally just hire one of their loyal customers to Tweet for them. Barter social lovin’ for free sandwiches and coffee. Last I checked, it’s still above 8% unemployment.
