These days it is not uncommon for food to get onto Facebook / Instagram or Pinterests of the world before it gets into the mouth.
Armed with this insight, Spoon – one of the largest restaurant chains in Costa Rica created the following campaign.
Developed by GarnierBBDO, the beauty of this campaign is that it smartly builds upon an existing habit of people. And why Facebook? Apparently, Costa Rica has one of the highest ratios of Facebook to internet users of 95% (source).
Damn smart! I’d say.
Such campaigns can be a great inspiration for restaurants and bars seeking to drive awareness and generate talkability with minimum investment and presumably a high ROI. In fact, fast food industry today is known to be one of the most represented on Instagram with a near 100% adoption rate!
Instagram Adoption by Brands per Industry
From left to right: cars, fast food, soft drinks, apparel, telcos, retail, personal care, beer, luxury, financial institutes, insurance, technology, oil & gas
(Instagram adoption, MillwardBrown 2012 BrandZ index, Source)
And yes, Food happens to be the #1 category of content on Pinterest too with 57% of Pinterest users known to have interacted with food-related content during 2012. (source)
Now, let’s take one step back in the process and look at another emergent habit
Even before we tag the food in our plates on our Social Media pages, what do we do? We place our order with the waiter/bartender. However this poor waiter today vies for our attention with – surprise, surprise – our mobile phones. Thanks to our emergent habit of ‘checking in’ also called ‘location tagging’.
In fact, during the two year period ended in September 2012, Facebook has seen 17 billion location tagged posts including check ins (source). And to put that number into perspective, using May 2013 statistics, this would equal every single user of Facebook in the world checking in/ location tagging at least 8 times in an year over 2011 and 2012!
Understandably Facebook wants to make this key statistic- that of every user around the world checking in on Facebook – a reality. So after a pilot that was successfully run for over an year at over 1,000 SMEs in the US, Facebook – on October 2nd 2013 – has formalized an arrangement with CISCO. Named as ‘Facebook Wi-Fi‘ program, it converts retailers’ routers in the US into public Wi-Fi hotspots accessible to customers of the merchant establishment for free on one apparent condition. The deal? Go to the retailer’s/restaurant’s Facebook page and check in, and you have the Internet for free!
In other words, the three-step Facebook Wi-Fi system, which can be deployed by merchants running a Cisco router setup, lets people connect to a venue’s Wi-Fi, launch their browser, and click on the blue check-in button to gain unfettered access to the Internet.
The deal for the merchant establishment?
- Obviously each customer check in generates visibility leading to additional exposure that could pull in more customers or inspire more ‘likes’
- While Facebook shares with the merchant an aggregate of anonymous demographic data such as age, gender, and interests on customers who sign-in to Facebook Wi-Fi, which they can potentially use for more effective targeting of their upcoming Facebook advertising campaigns
For Facebook, the Wi-Fi-with-check-in initiative is part of a broader plan to attack the local market by encouraging merchants to set up and maintain Pages on the social network and more importantly to seed – in the general public – the habit of ‘checking in’ on Facebook and thereby become the default gateway for the Internet.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world…
Chances are that you would have heard of Facebook Zero. If not, you should read this post right away. Essentially in 2010 Facebook collaborated with several mobile operators around the world and worked out an arrangement whereby the end users of these mobile networks can access 0.facebook.com – a faster and a free version of Facebook for your mobile, no matter which phone it is – without any data charges. People will only pay for data charges when they view photos or when they leave 0.facebook.com to browse other mobile sites. So, when they click to view a photo or browse another mobile site a notification page appears to confirm that they will be charged if they want to leave 0.facebook.com.
When this was launched in 2010, Facebook signed up 50 mobile carriers in 45 countries. The following image shows how Facebook made itself accessible on every class of phone through this initiative:
How Facebook made itself accessible on every class of phone (Image source)
A smart way to drive usage of Facebook in emerging markets where the average monthly spend on mobile connectivity, which is often just voice and text, is 8-12% of the average take-home pay of a cell phone user. (source) In fact in just 10 months after its launch, Facebook Zero has become so popular in Africa that the site was said to have driven the adoption of broadband internet, just so users can have faster access to all those pictures and status updates!
Read this brilliant post on Quartz on how Facebook is conquering the world one mobile at a time.
Today, with more mobiles on earth than are people, and with smartphone penetration exponentially increasing in the emerging markets, the story has but just begun – after all there are 250 million Facebook users in Asia , more than on any other continent, and yet that’s just 6.5% of the population. In Africa, its penetration is less than 5%.
And then Google launches Free Zone.
And the battle for world domination continues one mobile at a time.
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