Panera Bread Menu: Great Social Media
Business Websites
We’re working from the Florida offices this week where we have a Panera Bread just down the road. Never really impressed by the limited Panera Bread menu, we’re not frequent patrons, but we are impressed by Panera Bread’s Social Media efforts as well as the company’s overall digital presence.
Panera Bread is a chain of bakery–café quick casual restaurants in the United States and Canada that sells breads, sandwiches, soups, salads, and other bakery items. Its headquarters are in Sunset Hills, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.
It’s not exactly the kind of company we would guess would rank highly on our Social Media ranking factors, but it kind of blew us away.
In fact, Panera Bread’s Social Media presence begins in its stores.
Virtually all locations offer free Wi-Fi to customers. Surprisingly to us, Panera Bread is the largest provider of free Wi-Fi in the US. And while many locations restrict the duration of free Wi-Fi to 30 or 60 minutes during peak hours, that’s still an impressive fact.
The website is clean, focused and has a clear call to action. At the same time, the site carries the Panera Bread branding very well. Users can quickly accomplish the most common tasks with one click and the site loads in under 3 seconds on our connection. Users also can create and manage personalized accounts similar to Starbucks Rewards.
Additionally, the site puts Social Media front and center with links to its Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts.
And Panera Bread is using each of these networks to their strengths.
The Facebook Page’s landing page has a strong call to action for Likers to share their story, taking advantage of Facebook’s share functionality which makes spreading content easy and engaging.
Over at the Twitter account, Panera Bread engages followers and their brand. The company actively looks for mentions of their brand, negative and positive, and reacts accordingly. The account also responds to followers in a timely manner and correctly takes public dialogue to direct messages where the general Twitter population doesn’t have to be exposed to Business/Consumer back and forth.
But we were most impressed with Panera Bread’s YouTube channel. Panera gives its YouTube subscribers an inside look into the company and its philosophy of providing the freshest food possible.
Each network supports Panera Bread’s mission in unique ways. Facebook fosters engagement. Twitter provides customer service. YouTube gives life to the company’s philosophy. And the website aggregates the networks and acts as the users hub to get information and manager their account.
Panera Bread deserves more recognition for its Social Media efforts. The company definitely “gets it.”
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About Cody Swann
Cody Swann is an entrepreneur, developer, strategist, banged up ex-football walk-on, retired body builder and former journalist born and raised in South Florida. He currently splits his time between his hometown of Stuart, FL and Los Angeles, CA. Cody founded Gunner Technology, a highly sought after digital agency, specializing in helping companies maximize profits through custom web development, technology efficiencies, social media strategy and search engine marketing.
As a manager and developer at ESPN for nearly six years, Cody led development and vision for two of ESPN’s most popular online features: Sports Scoreboards and GameCasts. Additionally Cody oversaw all aspects of MyESPN and ESPN’s social network, ESPN Fan Profiles. Cody worked with Technology, Editorial, Sales, Marketing and relevant business stakeholders to mold ESPN’s social media strategy, develop custom applications for it and execute it. Under his direction, ESPN successfully ported large portions of its core product from a proprietary Java stack to an open source Ruby on Rails stack, capable of standing up and performing under the tremendous load world's most popular sports site delivers.
Cody began forging his technological knowledge more than 10 years ago, developing and designing websites in college. His development work has included web development, web design, content writing, digital photography and digital video production for award-winning sites like Gainesville.com, GatorSports.com and ESPN.com. He has helped set digital strategy and direction for companies in the New York Times Regional Newspaper group, ESPN, ABC and Disney.
He is a recognized expert in web development, social media strategy, search engine optimization, conversion optimization, analytics tracking and business planning. He has worked with large interactive media companies to small and medium sized businesses. Cody motivates and inspires creative teams to deliver superb, polished work under tight deadlines.