I recently read an article on Nydia Gunawan’s blog about how Ryan Smolkin, the founder of Smoke’s Poutinerie, used social media to market his business. Information and technological integration has had the reputation of high costs and low success rates. But people like Smolkin has proved otherwise by capitalizing the low cost of social media and influence it has on consumers.
Image taken from: http://www.local10.com/news/money/French-fry-joint-lures-customers-through-Facebook/-/1717308/22867418/-/ugy3vi/-/index.html
In my opinion, by using free and highly accessible social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, Smolkin managed to save advertising costs and achieve something that regular advertisements cannot.
Smolkin took advantage of the fact that both Facebook and Twitter are used by many users daily. By uploading things that would attract his target demographic, mainly news on sports, ideas for new recipes and events taking place in his company, he managed to transform a regular Twitter or Facebook page into a source of daily entertainment that his customers would want to be a part of. Its no wonder that the number of followers on the company’s Facebook page is constantly growing, and customers are now automatically befriending his Facebook page.