Social Media Strategy- The Cheesecake Factory

Active on: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest
Communication Strategy: Images, few videos
Even though The Cheesecake Factory has official pages on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, only the links to the Twitter and Facebook pages are posted on their website.
The Cheesecake Factory is very interactive on social media. On Twitter they reply to tweets on an hourly basis. They re-tweet good tweets made by satisfied customers and having appealing images of what they order. The uploaded content are mostly photographs of their signature cheesecakes and other dishes, but they even upload videos for special occasions such as Easter or competitions. Customer posts are usually positives, few complaints and good number of requests to open more locations, mostly in the customer’s home town (Figure 1.3). Posts show a fair amount of positive sentiments from the customers’ side and the page administrator replies to every post or comment by customers in good time. However, some of the negative posts made by the customers have not been followed up (Figure 1.2). Some of the negative feeds were due to a restaurant in Syracuse, NY failing 2 health inspections (Figure 1.1). Fig: 1.1 To drive traffic to their restaurants and engage with more customers, The Cheesecake Factory organized a competition called “The Cheesecake Factory’s Cheesecake Madness Sweepstakes”. This way, they also promoted their cheesecakes. Participants were required to submit their entries via Facebook. During each round of the Game, flavors of cheesecake were matched-up against one-another with Facebook users voting for their favorite flavor. Winning flavors advanced to the next round of the Game, until an overall winning flavor of cheesecake was determined. Fig: 1.2 Fig: 1.3 One missed marketing opportunity was when they could have utilized their feature on ‘The Big Bang Theory’ to their advantage. Branded entertainment is becoming popular as a means of advertising. Chipotle Mexican Grill funded a whole T.V. show, ‘Farmed and Dangerous’ with the sole purpose of promoting their brand. The Cheesecake Factory, on the other hand, chose to not have any association with a successful and popular sit-com.
Facebook: The Cheesecake Factory’s Facebook page has over 4,776,762 likes and about 38,822 people are talking about it.
Twitter: The Cheesecake Factory has more than 259K followers on Twitter. They conduct periodic sessions using the tag, #CheesecakeChat where their VP, Guest Experience engages with customers. The bio of their Twitter page is a simple, “The Official Cheesecake Factory Twitter page.” They have seen 75,536 tweets in the past 30 days with a positive sentiment of 85%.
Instagram: Instagram feed features photos of food items available at their restaurants; primarily their signature cheesecakes. There is a fair amount of activity on this front, with an average of 10 photos being uploaded per week.
Pinterest: The Cheesecake Factory has boards on Pinterest where customers are encouraged to upload photos on Twitter or Instagram which would be featured there. The account manages 17 boards and has made 692 Pins till now. It has 6833 followers.
Yelp: The average Yelp rating of The Cheesecake Factory restaurants across America turned out to be 3.5/5
( This is an extract from our ebook on Social Media Strategy review of  Top US Casual Dining Restaurants, you can view it here)