Texas Roadhouse is making mobile an integral part of its strategy via an initiative that incorporates Facebook Places, foursquare and Instagram.

Through the initiative, Texas Roadhouse uncovered a significant difference in engagement on content published to the local Facebook Place pages and content published to the brand page. In fact, the content on Texas Roadhouse's local pages got 71 percent higher engagement than the content on the brand page.

?Texas Roadhouse is a community restaurant and our focus is therefore on local customer engagement,? said Dave Dodson, director of communications at Texas Roadhouse.

?When it comes to social media, mobile enables a local strategy as customers are using their smartphones to engage with their neighborhood Texas Roadhouse,? he said. ?We want to facilitate and encourage as much of that as possible.?

Driving engagement
Texas Roadhouse worked with MomentFeed to bolster its mobile, social efforts across the company?s 390-plus locations over a three-month period.

During the three-month period, Texas Roadhouse generated 21 million Facebook impressions by sharing content to its local restaurant pages and curating customer-generated photos from Instagram and foursquare.

The company also worked with MomentFeed to resolve all venue inaccuracies on Facebook and foursquare and make sure that there were no inaccurate geocodes.

?During the almost three months of this study, we saw Facebook check-ins increase by 33 percent, which is entirely specific to mobile,? Mr. Dodson said.

?We also saw significant increases across other Facebook KPIs that are made up of engagement from both smartphones and PCs, such as customers tagging their locations ? a 54 percent increase ? and ?People Talking About This,? which increased by 68 percent,? he said. 

?It's also worth mentioning that we've seen a 22 percent increase in Instagram photos taken by our customers and tagged to our locations in the first half of December, compared to the last half of November.?

Social efforts
Social is integral is driving brand awareness.

Mobile and social complement each other, therefore, incorporating social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and foursquare into the mix is a great way for Texas Roadhouse to build a relationship with new and loyal consumers.

?Mobile bridges the gap between social media and local marketing,? Mr. Dodson said.

?Our customers are engaging with us through social channels like Facebook, foursquare, Instagram and Twitter, and we encourage that by responding to them, liking their photos and sharing the best content they create across our local Facebook Pages,? he said.

?It's a great way for us to reinforce that we are a community restaurant which is a key part of our overall initiatives.?

Final Take
Rimma Kats is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York