Restaurant’s Instagram contest boosts app engagement by 66 percent

That’s certainly how the team at Barney’s Beanery, a Los Angeles-area restaurant and sports bar, used it for a few years. Then its management looked quite literally down the street from a location to find MomentFeed, a monitoring platform that streamlines disparate social media presences for businesses.

“They were really instrumental in helping us figuring things out,” says AJ Sacher, regional manager at Barney’s. “We started to look at things a lot differently.”

With that tool in place, Barney’s was able to run a two-month Instagram photo contest that not only led to a 66 percent increase in engagement via the photo-sharing app, but also increased social media engagement across the board.

The before

Barney’s has had a social media coordinator on staff for about two years, and before the chain started using MomentFeed, that coordinator divided his attention among a Facebook page for each restaurant location and a few Twitter accounts.

“We’ve done kind of what you would assume people do,” Sacher says. “We weren’t really sure from a restaurant or retail standpoint how to use it efficiently.”