#VeteransDay: Brands Honor Soldiers Past & Present

We give brands a lot of grief for social media flubs, especially when they make ham-handed attempts to exploit real-time trends and topics. We have been known to urge businesses to stand down on social media on certain anniversaries. But today we’re putting aside our cynicism about motives and presenting a sample of brands’ Veterans […]

on November 11, 2014 at 5:01 pm | Reading time: 4 minutes
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We give brands a lot of grief for social media flubs, especially when they make ham-handed attempts to exploit real-time trends and topics. We have been known to urge businesses to stand down on social media on certain anniversaries.

But today we’re putting aside our cynicism about motives and presenting a sample of brands’ Veterans Day tweets. Besides we couldn’t find any significant missteps. Most tweets had very subtle, if any, marketing messages, sticking with thanking military veterans and current troops serving the country. Here are a few of the best:

Several restaurants and food service providers — including Starbucks, Chili’s and Applebees — offered free items to veterans and people currently serving, but Texas Roadhouse’s effort is unique. The steakhouse chain started promoting their Veterans Day lunch giveaway last week with social media posts from @TexasRoadhouse and influencers recruited by their digital agency LEAP.

Using the hashtag #TexasRHforVets, they asked people to share the pictures of their loved ones in the military and to spread the word about the free lunch and a sweepstakes on Monday with a grand prize of a year’s worth of free steak dinners. The campaign took off, drawing nearly 60 million Twitter impressions through Monday, and pushed its way into Twitter’s U.S. trending topics, according LEAP.

We checked with social marketing platform Spredfast and confirmed that Texas Roadhouse got very positive social returns from the campaign. The tweet that introduced the event on November 3, got 184 retweets a 475% increase over its average for retweets. And during the week of the campaign, according to Spredfast data, Texas Roadhouse got 800% more Twitter mentions — 656 a day — than its daily average for the previous month.

So it was a victory all around for Texas Roadhouse, big reach and priceless good will. Here’s a sample of some of the tweets shared with the restaurant chain:

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

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Martin Beck
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Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.

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