As America's oldest restaurant chain, we at A&W Restaurants know that nostalgia is one of our strongest assets, & we want to celebrate that with our fans on Facebook every day. Using a mix of food images, vintage photos, videos & user-generated content, our goal is to find ways to connect with our fans from multiple generations in an authentic & engaging way. Our fans are the heart of what we do, & the A&W Restaurants Facebook page is a place where everyone can come to share their A&W memories & stay up-to-date with the latest happenings of an iconic brand.
We don't just want to tell our fans a story through our Facebook page, we want the A&W Restaurants page to be a conversation between the brand, our fans & our franchise community. With an always-on approach to social strategy, our goal is to connect our fans with our food & culture on a daily basis. Whether we're introducing a new burger, opening new restaurants or celebrating the anniversary of one of our existing locations, we set out to show that the A&W Restaurants community is still a thriving part of American restaurant culture.
Real-time responses: Facebook is an extremely valuable platform that allows our fans & restaurant guests multiple opportunities to contact A&W: through wall posts, post comments, messenger or by linking to our website. Our goal is to respond to every comment within 24 hours. Through Facebook we're able to answer questions about our food, connect fans with individual restaurants & make sure that our restaurant owners & operators are given the information they need to run successful businesses.
Engaging content: Our fans really respond to photos, videos & questions, so we design all of our campaigns with those factors in mind. We've given our Cheese Curds personalities by creating Curd Characters & asking fans to let us know where their next Curd-ventures should send them. During March we pit our menu items up against each other during #MenuMadness & ask our fans to vote on their favorites. Our #FreeMugFriday promotions celebrate the iconic frosty A&W mug, & encourage our fans to answer questions for a chance to win a limited edition Collector's Mug. For the past 4 years we've crowdsourced our Collector's Mug design & let fans choose the winner. We're always looking for user-generated content & have curated thousands of fan photos & videos.
Increased reach through Brand Ambassadors: In 2015 we started to notice A&W "superfans" on our Facebook page: fans who engaged regularly with our posts, who entered every giveaway & who shared photos of their restaurant visits on our page. In 2016 we began reaching out to these fans to encourage them to spread the A&W love by sharing content with their friend networks. We now have a group of dedicated A&W Brand Ambassadors who get early access to new content, behind-the-scenes looks at our test kitchen & are asked for input on new product & promotion development.
