What Opportunities Are You Missing To Let Your Customers Know How To Find You Online?

Recently I went into Madison Sourdough (on Willy St. on the Near East side). Great restaurant, amazing bread (obviously!).

For those who haven’t been, it’s a pretty simple ordering process: you walk in, order at the counter, get a table number and then they bring your food to you. Nothing novel or groundbreaking.

But their table number got me thinking about how a business can use (or fail to use) all of their available real estate.

Here was my number:

Many restaurants would simply hand out a sign with the number on it. What a waste of valuable real estate that would have been!

Rather than simply serving as a function of the ordering process, this placard worked to both inform me that Madison Sourdough is online (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest) and to encourage me to post about them using the hashtag #MadisonSourdough.

Many customers are going to automatically post pictures of their meal online anyway. You might as well make it easy for those happy customers to give credit to the restaurant. And for those who might not have thought to snap a picture of their lunch and put it online, you get a chance to offer a little nudge in the social media direction.

So here’s a question: what real estate is your business/organization utilizing? And more importantly, which opportunities are you missing?

People are going to post about you and your brand regardless, you might as well be working with them.