What Do You Think of TGI Friday’s Social Media Campaign?

Written by: Eric Brantner on September 11, 2009 – 10:02 am

Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast)

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By now, you’ve probably seen a commercial or an online ad for TGI Friday’s new social media campaign. If you haven’t, let me give you a rundown. The idea of the campaign is that Woody is TGI Friday’s #1 Fan. If he can get 500,000 fans on Facebook by the end of the month, everyone who registers to follow him gets a free burger. I think it’s a pretty good idea, and I’ll tell you why.

First, the basic idea behind this campaign has been used successfully before. Just last month, Starbucks gave away free ice cream coupons to those who joined their fan page. The campaign generated a lot of buzz, it was purely social, and it was a great way for Starbucks to begin extending its brand into ice cream.

Although the TGI Friday’s campaign is just a few days old, it’s already picking up some steam. As of the time of me writing this post, Woody has over 254,000 fans on Facebook. More importantly, a simple Twitter search for related terms (i.e. TGI Friday’s, Woody TGI Friday’s, free burger, etc.) shows that the campaign is starting to catch on. People are sending out Tweets telling their friends to fan Woody on Facebook. I wouldn’t say it’s gone viral yet, but it’s still early, and I think it has the potential to. As it gets closer to that September 30th deadline, I think the word of mouth will really start to pick up.

The other thing I like about this campaign is that if it’s successful, it will actually bring a lot of foot traffic into their business. See, too many social media campaigns suffer from not finding a way to bridge the social aspect to actual physical business. In theory, if this campaign goes according to plan, 500,000 people will be going into a TGI Friday’s to claim their free burger. Not only will many of these people probably order appetizers, desserts, drinks since the burger is free, but if they have a good experience, they could bring repeat business for years to come.

I’m interested to see how this plays out for TGI Friday’s. If all goes well, you can rest assured you’ll see even more businesses jumping on the social media bandwagon.