There are two hot trends today: 1. The Adaption of Facebook Groups, and 2. The Rock Hill Eats Group on Facebook (local to Rock Hill, South Carolina). Growing a group on Facebook can be very hard – or very easy depending on who you ask. In this article, we’ve interviewed the Admin of the Facebook Group Rock Hill eats, Mike Brabham. In this interview, we’ll dive into how the group came about, what their future plans are, how to grow an engaged Facebook Group, and what it looks like in the day-to-day of managing a highly engaged and rapidly growing Facebook Group.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
Introduce yourself and tell us about your background.
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
My name is Mike Brabham. I am a Rock Hill native, born and raised, moved away for a short time to college, and just came back home. My background is in, strangely enough, automotive management. I worked at several of the local dealerships here in Rock Hill, worked at the Honda dealership for quite a few years. But lately, it’s been small business consulting, doing some marketing for them online, and in recent months and years, it’s been kind of leaning towards the restaurant industry and that’s kind of how the Rock Hill Eats thing got going.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
What do you do outside of the RHE group when you’re not managing the group?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Well, I’m still tied to the automotive industry. I help businesses with their sales. We just look at the sales process, how they handle their customers. And we try to get all that dialed in and then we look at the other side, which is lead generation, how can we make the phone ring? If it’s a plumber, how can I make the phone ring? If they’re selling furniture – How can I load up their showroom with customers? I have quite a bit of social media background. A lot of other locally owned businesses, your mom, and pop shops, they tend to be lacking in that area. Especially restaurants, maybe they’re somebody that knows how to cook and makes great food. Everybody said, “Hey, you should open a restaurant” so they do. Well, they don’t necessarily know anything about business, or about marketing or social media, even if they did, they’re probably busy doing what they do best, which is making great food. That’s where folks like me could come in and help them out and just try to help grow their business. Just be a partner with them. I spent a lot of time doing that outside of the restaurant industry. With just various places.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
What is the Rock Hill Eats group? What’s the purpose?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Well, I think that’s an important thing if you’re looking to grow a group or create a group and get it going, you kind of start with your goal in mind. And then reverse engineer your steps to get to that goal. Some people just create a group just for a hobby, just for fun. Some people just create a group for educational reasons. And for me, I’ve always been a business owner. And being from Rock Hill, I’ve always been local. I’ve always tried to do business with a local place as often as I can. Not only restaurants but just on my other day-to-day shopping. For me, it was about a few things: supporting local businesses. I wanted it to be a valuable resource. Rock Hill was growing pretty quickly. We have 75,000 people now. And more and more people are moving to Rock Hill and, and Fort Mill as well. And they have been for years. And so this is a nice, cool place where a new resident that’s new to the area can jump in there. And like, they’re not going to find this information at the Chamber of Commerce. There’s information here that will help people say they have a gluten allergy or just whatever it is. They’ll be able to figure out where they can go eat in the area. Maybe they’re vegetarian, I’ve been doing a healthy, maybe they are 100% Pizza diet. They need to know the best pizza in town.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
That’s me. Haha!
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
With the group, it’s a good, valuable resource for everybody in the county. And of course, for me, I wanted to just get the group going, but I knew eventually I would monetize the group. And we started to do that recently. And we can speak about that later if you like. I knew eventually there would be a business side to it, where I would try to monetize it. And then the fourth piece of the puzzle is, it goes along with monetizing it. I’m able to give back to the community so we donate a portion of our proceeds to a local charity here in York County.
So that’s where I started. That’s before the group got large like it is. Those were the four things I wanted to accomplish, definitely support local business, just a cool resource for the local residents, and eventually monetize and have a charity aspect to it. Those were my four. I think it’s when you do anything in life, you have to have a clear vision, a clear definition of a goal that you work towards. It’s a lot better than just kind of going through the motions day in and day out. You’ve got a plan.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
What are some reasons why people join the Rock Hill Eats group?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Yeah, I see a lot of people messaging me all the time. And I see a lot of comments, “Hey, I’m new to the area, just looking for good places to eat.” I think at this point, the way Facebook’s algorithm is, I think they serve up our page as people are shuffling around in other areas of Facebook. I think it’s being shown a lot from Facebook. It’s maybe 200-300 per week, sometimes our biggest week for new members was 900 new members in one week. The group was public for quite a while intentionally I left it public and then also intentionally wanted to hit 10,000 members, I made it a private group. Let’s say you’re a Rock Hill resident, and you are surfing around on Facebook and you see this thing is Rock Hill Eats, 16,000 members. And you click on it and you can’t see what’s in it, because it’s a private group. What does that make you want to do? Makes you want to join. There are 16,000 people that know something I don’t about Rock Hill, the food scene in Rock Hill. I’m going to join this group because the fact that it’s private, has helped it grow even faster. It also helps with the security thing – it keeps your spam and all that stuff. You know, folks from Bangladesh, trying to join the group. It minimizes that kind of stuff.
But I really think when they do join, there’s so much cool information there. And we go through waves of negativity. With that many new members, it’s hard to keep a consistent culture in the group. If somebody will come in there and just say something really negative. It’s kind of self-policing, people that have been with me for a while. They’ll sort of pounce on somebody if they say something out of line. But if as a whole, it’s a very positive environment, people. It’s a good place for, unlike Yelp, it’s a good place for restaurant owners and managers to get involved and engage their customers. Maybe they had a bad experience. So the owner or restaurant manager can hop in there and just say, “Hey, let me make this right for you. I apologize it didn’t live up to expectations. Let me do this for you”. Keep that customer coming back. So not only a resource for residents to find out about good places to eat but also a good resource for restaurant owners and managers as well.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
What is your role in the Rock Hill Eats group and how did you get involved?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
This group was created by Michael Blackwell some years back. Shortly after he did, he had to tend to some family matters which took his focus off the group. I think this was in 2017 when he created the group.
So two years later, I came along and joined the group, and immediately kind of clicks with me. I think they had maybe 1000 or 2000 members at that time. So with no effort at all, it kind of grew from zero to a couple thousand people with no moderation. Nobody was looking. Nobody was promoting it as it was in a natural, organic way. So I came in and it immediately kind of clicked with me. I love the food scene. I’m from here. I love supporting local businesses. So it just kind of clicked. So I sent him a message and I said, I said “Mike, would you mind, or do you feel like you need some help moderating from here, I know a lot of places here, I can probably help grow the group into something and it was like, Sure. So I jumped in and after a short time, he made me an admin. So we have two admins, him and myself. I also have two moderators to help approve members and remove content that’s not appropriate (that sort of thing).
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
On average, how many posts by community members per day/week are there?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
It’s up and down. I don’t have the breakdown of posts. What I have is, in the back end of it, they lump them together – comments and reactions. So this can be a Yeah. A “like” or a “heart” or an “angry” or whatever. Yeah, action plus comments together. We get 100,000 per month.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
Wow, that’s great.
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
That’s over 3000 per day. And most of these are reactions rather than comments, but we do get quite a few comments. Just like any business that has ups and downs right now is in the summer, last-minute vacations, and parents trying to do back to school things. So engagements down a little bit, which we expected. But it’s just kind of a gray thing I expect once the kids are back in, in the groove, just like all retail it’ll pick back up it
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
Have you ever considered manually approving posts in your group to avoid/intersect spammy/hateful posts?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
I haven’t because it is just so much. I would be glued to my computer all day every day. And just some of the posts are timely. So for restaurants, they post at 1pm in the afternoon and say “hey, come join us for happy hour for 4-6.” If I’m doing other things and I can’t approve that post until seven at night, I take away the restaurant’s chance to promote themselves in the group.
There is a tool in the back end where you can set up keywords that will flag a post. So I do utilize that too. But I don’t think I have the bandwidth to approve each post promptly.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
How many members do you have in the group as of today?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
We have over 16,000 members in the group as of today.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
What makes the Rock Hill Eats Facebook Group unique over other similar Facebook groups?
There are several groups out there similar to the Rock Hill Eats group in the area. What makes Rock Hill Eats a little bit different because I know you guys kind of accept anything in York County related really. So it’s not specific to Rock Hill. So what’s the difference between yours versus like York County Eats or something like that?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Yeah, I think that’s a good question. People like engagement. Some groups you go into and it’s like, they don’t want any negative reviews. So it’s not real. It’s just that everything on there is “sunshine and rainbows”, or they’ll delete it. Well, that’s not real life. And that’s not what people want to know. People want to know what good experiences people had and what bad experiences they had at a restaurant and they want to see how did the manager handle it? You know, all that stuff. You don’t get that with a lot of other groups. It’s not that we embrace negativity, but we embrace real, you know? I do things in the group, but you’re not going to find in any of the other groups around. You got to know your group. You have to know who’s in your group. This out of my 16,000 members. I know how many of them are restaurant owners, restaurant employees, or how many of them are just the end-user, the consumer, just looking for cool places to eat. So you cater to how you speak to them. You consider that. Who are you talking to? So you got to know your audience. Consistent posting from admin. In a lot of these groups, the admin is like asleep. They’re not very engaged in their group. They created a group because they thought it was cool or they saw a YouTube video or maybe they saw my group and said, “Hey, I’m gonna create one of those too.” And it just sits there. They’re not actively engaged with the group. I give a new member welcome. Usually every Monday. I thank them a lot for all their pictures and then or for all the sharing and invites that they do. Talk to them. Just engage with them.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
I think there’s a strong correlation. I mean, that’s kind of that’s one thing that makes a, like a restaurant really powerful is when the manager or the owner is engaging with their customers. It’s kind of a similar type of thing. You’re engaging, you’re talking to people. You’re sharing stuff. So I think that’s kind of cool. It’s like when the manager comes to your table at a restaurant, and asks you how everything’s doing and stuff like that, man, it’s kind of a similar type of thing.
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
So I don’t just post what I want to see. I asked my group. What do they want to get out of the group? And I’ll put a poll out there every now and then. Hey, what do you guys want to see? New restaurant alert? Like a compilation of all the happy hours in town? Kids eat free nights. What do you want to see? And then I Listen, and then I create content based on what they want. I could post pictures of sushi all day long. I love sushi, but not everybody in my group likes sushi. I’m saying that off the top of my head for example. Find out what, what people want to know, and give it to them. That’s why people like the group. I do contests. I’ll go to restaurants and I’ll talk to them about sponsoring a contest. And a giveaway – like a dinner for two. Like a photo contest I did. The last one we did was for Burgers & Barley – right before COVID-19 hit. And I just had everybody post a picture of their favorite burger. And it didn’t have to be one from there. It could be just because of the burger photo contest and whoever got the most likes on their photo got a free dinner for two and Burgers and Barley. Just fun stuff like that. And these other groups aren’t doing that. I think the group is what it is because it’s very engaging. Very fun.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
What are your favorite types of posts in the Rock Hill Eats group?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
I love it. When I see somebody posts and this happens frequently. They’ll say (there’s a couple of reasons why I like this type of post). But I like it when somebody says, “I went to Mary’s cafe for the first time because of this group. And it was awesome. Here’s why. I ordered this, it tasted this way. It was great. I met the owners, they’re great people that came over to me at the table. I like it when they say they discovered a new place because of the group. That’s what I like.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
Yeah, that’s pretty awesome. That’s fulfilling.
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
And that ties into when you go to monetize. I can have a stack of those types of posts set off to the side and I can show a restaurant. “Hey, here are 20 people that discovered your restaurant because of this group”. And that’s without even advertising. So I use that to help me sell advertising opportunities to restaurants.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
Yeah, that’s great. That’s proof right there.
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
That’s the other reason it is fulfilling, but it’s also why I use that to count a sales tool to help me show the value of the group to the restaurant. Right?
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
So how do you usually handle negative posts? In the group? If it’s like, if it’s not validated, and it’s like hateful?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
I guess it depends. It’s a case by case thing. There are levels of severity and everything. Yeah. Depending on what it is, and depending on how many kinds of infractions I guess that particular user has had, I mean, I might just delete the posts and then send them a note why they’re posted was deleted, share the widget and they broke or I might turn off post approval for that specific member or might just remove them from the group. And then the last step I would, I might block them so they can’t rejoin. So it depends on if it’s something straight-up racist or hateful, they get insta-blocked, ya know?
But I do try to, I do try to let people know, especially if they’re new to the group, let them know, Hey, we don’t, we can’t allow this post. And here’s why you broke rule number three, so don’t do that.
But as you do that, it shows you, if I see somebody who has been a member for three months, and they’ve had six things already removed from admin, we’ve had to delete six things from them in three months. They’re probably not a good fit for our group. So I may give them one final Warning or something, but usually, that’s the person that is just looking for a fight or they’re just looking for this and are a “keyboard warrior”.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
If you could sit down with every single member of the Rock Hill Eats group, what would you tell/ask them?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Wow, that’s a good one. Well, I would, I would certainly want to know, are they enjoying the group? Are they getting out of the group? What do they want? Get some feedback there. Because that’s, that’s priority one. That’s what keeps growing and keeps the group keeps people from leaving your group. Are they getting what they want out of it? I would want to know that Yeah. I would certainly ask them to since they felt that way, would they mind inviting a couple of hundred people. I think if your intent is genuine and you just want them to enjoy the group, you can see them get value in it. And that’s what it’s all about for me.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
If you could sit down with every single restaurant owner in the group, what would you tell/ask them?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Tell them they need to advertise with me. No, seriously, I would thank him for their input. In the group, and please continue to engage with your customers whether they mentioned your restaurant positively or negatively. Just please, please do. Yeah, if something went wrong, jump in there, and let’s make it right. We don’t want people bashing your business. And if it’s a positive thing, hey, think about what that feels like to just your everyday resident. In Rock Hill Eats, “I had a good dinner at Danny’s pizza. I had this, this, and this.” Then the GM Kevin pops in there says, “Hey, thanks for having thanks for choosing Danny last night. I saw your post. Just want to thank you for your business. If I can do anything in the future we’re going to be here, blah, blah, blah.” Then that person says, “Hey, the GM at Danny’s just reached out to me on Facebook and thanked me just because of my post. I mean That test oh yeah come back they’re gonna go back. They’re gonna go back today so – Engagement – I would just ask them please continue to engage with your customers in the group yeah that’s also on the tail so awesome operators are better operators and help diners the better diners
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
Yeah, that sounds like a motto to me, or a tagline or something.
If you had all the money and resources needed, what would you do to better the Rock Hill Eats Facebook group?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
I got so many ideas for the group that I haven’t been able to do. Most of it is time-related. Not so much money-related. One example I’m trying to get a thing started called a small business spotlight. So we’re going to take advantage of the Units feature in Facebook groups. You can set it up like that – an educational course, but we wanted to set up small business spotlights. So, maybe we posted on a Saturday, maybe a Small Business Saturday, or whatever. But people have expressed an interest in like a behind the scenes kind of look at a restaurant. So maybe, I’d like the ability to go in and take pictures of the restaurant, sit down with the owner or the chef’s – Let’s talk to them. Let’s get an idea. What was the inspiration behind this dish? Why is this dish so popular? When did you guys open? Instead of just a review of their food, let’s give them the story. Let’s tell the story of The White Horse. Tell him how I got started. People don’t know that The White Horse used to be in Charlotte, or there was another one. (The White Horse closed shortly after this interview. You can read about it here.) But I mean, there’s so much that people might want to know, especially new people that aren’t from here. So thinking about doing something like that, I can’t really do that. I do have somebody that’s a great kind of content writer. She’s local as well but I’m thinking about sending her out to do that kind of thing. So if we had unlimited resources, I’d be able to do things like that. That’s just one of many examples. That’s it, you know? Going back to trying to educate people, I’d like to have within that unit section want to educate people about different types of cuisine. We’re in Rock Hill, we’re a little bit Southern. There’s a lot of folks out there that don’t even know what Korean food is, or they think sushi means raw. So they got a bad taste in their mouth. Educate people about different types of foods. Indian food. We don’t have one Indian restaurant in Rock Hill. There’s one in Fort Mill – more than one, but just food and culture go hand in hand. Educate people about different cultures. Maybe we can help people understand other points of view, like, racial tension and all that stuff that’s way “bigger picture”. I don’t know if I could get help with something like that in the community. But there’s a lot in on the monetization side of things, you know, RockHillEats.com – see if people want to buy things, we could link the group to the website and sell products, or sell “how to increase your knife skills courses” or just whatever, you know, all of that kind of stuff. I can develop and use this audience to the purchases thing, affiliate link, so if anybody wants a Vitamix blender and they know what that is, then we could have a link where they could just buy it from the website. So there’s a lot of stuff that it could lead to, but it’s not in play right now.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
Have you paid to advertise the RHE group before? If so, what were your experiences?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
It’s done it by itself. I have not spent one penny on growing the group.
So, if that’s another thing if funds were not an issue, I’d certainly promote it with some paid advertising. I mean, my thoughts are How big can the group be? We’re gonna saturate the market. We’re gonna like how big of a percentage of the population do I expect to want to join my group? You know? Yeah, how big could it be? I guess there could be 200,000 because there are 200,000 residents in York County.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
I’m sure it’ll always grow at least slightly. If you ever hit the ceiling, it will always go a little bit because you’ll have people moving into this area.
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Yeah. And I think, yeah, there’s maybe 2000 members who live in Charlotte. We have some Charlotte residents that have joined as well.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
So, what’s next for Rock Hill Eats?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
The project that we’re in the middle of right now is the food truck pass. Yeah, I’ve contacted many different food trucks and when COVID-19 hit food trucks got really popular, restaurants were closed, people were tired of cooking at home. Food truck coming to your neighborhood was just kind of like a break. Just something new and a refreshing change. So the food trucks are blowing up. They’re popping up every month now but I contacted the most popular ones I could find. I got 16 of them to participate in this discount card. A $15 card. It goes through next summer (2021) so if the card is good for a year, and on the back of the card is a list of the trucks that are participating and there are discounts they are offering. So if you’re one that likes food trucks, you use it twice. It’s paid for. It’s kind of like that Attractions book. You buy it once and it’s good for a year. Use it twice, it’s paid for. But yeah, buy a burger and get a free burger. There are all kinds of different discounts on them. I’m just to the point now where that’s kind of on autopilot. The cards are printed, we received them. I just post about it in the group now and then. I haven’t paid to push the message out there. I don’t want the group to be too sales-y. I don’t want it to be like, “oh, here he is trying to sell that card again.” So I’ll leave it alone for a while and I’ll post it now and then. All I do now is just write a check every month to the charity. And, yeah, that’s pretty much the only work I have to do on it. It’s kind of on autopilot right now. But now I don’t have a new project right now that I’m doing with the group. Just maintaining.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
If you could change one thing about the Rock Hill and York County communities, what would it be?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
What I would like to see is, I don’t know if you’ve opened a brick and mortar business in the city limits of Rock Hill. They’re not very business-friendly. They make it very difficult. So many hoops to jump through the signage, ordinances are just ridiculous. If they’re not business-friendly, I feel like they could change a few things. And I have seen a lot of businesses choose to do business elsewhere. Maybe they’re outside the city limits, or maybe they’re that’s why it’s been very difficult to revitalize downtown, our main street is always going to look like that – it’s always going to have vacancies because of Rock Hill and their regulations. And it’s hard to do business here. If you’ve got the funds to do it, and the patients were, yeah, I mean, people will, people will come, but if they loosen up on some of that stuff, you’re gonna see a lot more growth in the downtown area. My opinion.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
Does the Rock Hill Eats group have a website? If not, do you have plans for one? What does that look like?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Yes. But it’s not. It’s not going to be an immediate thing, but it is something on the short to medium Horizon.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
For someone thinking about starting a similar group, what advice would you give them?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Use the best practices we talked about. Figure out your goal. Have a clear goal and figure out what you want. And then reverse engineer the steps to get there. If you want a food group like mine, you’ll need to get connected in the Restaurant Industry, get to know some owners and managers, and get it started. All the best practices to help build a food group would be the same to build any type of group: Know your audience, engage with them, be active in the group, thank them frequently for being a member, and for inviting others. If I see someone that invited 5-10 people, I’ll shoot them a message saying “hey, thanks for your engagement in the group, and thanks for inviting all those people. You’re helping us grow and we appreciate you”. Just little things like that – nobody does that! So if you’re part of a group that does things like that, you’re probably going to like that group and stay a member of that group. Just define what your group wants, give it to them, and ask them questions. I feel very fortunate. Maybe it was a timing thing, COVID-19 happened and a lot of people were at home on their computers and not working. And maybe that is a piece of why the group grew so fast. I’d like to say it was my good looks, but ya know, probably had something to do with it. To get a group started, you probably need to push it out there with some paid advertising, find other groups that are related, and link one group to another as a recommended group. Those are things you can do to grow a group. Have a clear definition of what you want your group to be, get some members, and talk to them.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
If you could go back to the first day you became admin of the group, what advice would you give yourself?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
My vision of the group was probably different than the creator of the group. So I think I did things his way – and didn’t want to just start changing things. So out of respect, I held back from starting new things within the group. I think I would have implemented some changes a little faster.
Zander Aycock @ Sharpen Marketing
If someone wants to get in touch with you about starting an Eats group or joining the Rock Hill Eats group, how should they reach out to you?
Mike Brabham @ Rock Hill Eats
Send me a Facebook Message or you can get in touch with me via phone or email.
- Join the Rock Hill Eats Facebook Group
- Message Mike through Facebook Messenger
- Phone Calls: (704) 591-9970
- Email: rockhilleats@gmail.com
Like this interview? Check out our restaurant owner interview with the owner of El Cancun, Taco Boiiz, and ¡Ay Papi!
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