Buffalo Wild Wings: Facebook Fan Page Example in Detail #24

Buffalo Wild Wings, the restaurant known for wings, beer and sports, is next up in our journey through 26 Facebook Fan Page Examples In Detail. The thriving chain of restaurants that started in Kent, Ohio now spans the entire continental US and has just shy of 8 million Facebook fans. Let’s see how Buffalo Wild Wings combines the communities of sports fanatics, beer lovers and wing-nuts on Facebook.


Judging a (face)Book by Its Cover

At first glance you will see the Buffalo Wild Wings fan page heavily features what it is that they do best — wings. Rightfully so, because the page’s highest performing posts are images of wings. On June 14, they posted a simple image of their buffalo-style wings, and the post received over 40k likes.

There are also a number of advocacy images that the page has posted in the past. These are great pieces of content that can easily go viral through social networks due to the comedic nature of the images.

Overall the brand does a decent job of posting content that gets fans engaged whether it is photos, polls or reminders for upcoming sporting events. Although, like most pages, content with photos performs better than text alone.

Sports Illustrated Experts Corner

The Sports Illustrated Experts Corner tab is a very cool feature that Buffalo Wild Wings offers to fans —especially for their fans that love sports. In essence, the tab provides a forum for sports fans to submit their questions to the experts at Sports Illustrated. The page is broken down into three sections; Sports Illustrated’s Latest Topic, Next Topic and Upcoming Topics. Upcoming Topics shows 6 future topics that will be discussed and has a feature that will send you a reminder when the topic is up next. That way you don’t miss your chance to submit your questions to the experts. In the Next Topic section, the tab allows you to submit your questions in comment form. After the questions have been collected, a video is posted on the topic in the Sports Illustrated’s Latest Topic section that answers fans’ questions.

This is a nice interactive page that captures the attention of one of the three main pillars of the page community — the sports fan.

Buy Gift Cards

There is a very cool tab on the Buffalo Wild Wings fan page that allows the marketing department to show a concrete ROI for social. The Buy Gift Cards tab allows fans to either order an actual plastic gift card or send someone a customized virtual gift card. The Facebook app that they have used, wGiftCard, has some great social functionality including the ability to pull in photos from your Facebook albums and sharing capabilities.

While on the subject, don’t forget to check out Ignite Social Media president Jim Tobin’s take on how to calculate social media ROI.

Timeline

Buffalo Wild Wings’ timeline is a bit neglected. They have not retroactively populated any content into their timeline — not even their date of establishment.

This is unfortunate as they do have an interesting history. The two founders had moved to Ohio and craved their beloved home-state New York buffalo-style wings, so they opened the store Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck. This is where the nickname BW3 came from. They later dropped the “and Weck.” All of this information could be great content, especially with the history of all the nicknames for the restaurant.

Fan Engagement Comparison

In comparison to a similar restaurant chain, Applebee’s, Buffalo Wild Wings is underperforming in terms of fan engagement. Although, there is a stark difference in strategy between the two brands. If you compare the posts on the Applebee’s Facebook page to those on the Buffalo Wild Wings page, it is clear that Applebee’s has caught onto the trend that photos included with content drive likes and shares. Buffalo Wild Wings does a number of polls and posts that are solely text. The average social network user is much more likely to interact with a photo than one with just text. There is a much lower investment of time to react to a photo. Both brands lowest engaging posts, at 0.01%, were text only. Both of their highest engagement rates were tied to posts including photographs.

Buffalo Wild Wings has flirted with some great content by creating the advocacy images in the past, but they could definitely step up their game by adding more photos and improving their timeline. With nearly 8 million fans and at least a thousand likes per post, they have excellent potential for growth.

Do you think Buffalo Wild Wings is using their Facebook presence affectively? Let us know what you think in the comments below.



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