The Most Socially Influential Restaurants in the USA

By Cari Martens | March 30, 2011 5:00 am

Web site SocialCoCo, a creation of blogger Paul Barron, who also founded FastCasual.com and QSRweb.com, has announced its list of the top 20 most influential restaurants in America. Social CoCo based its list on data compiled from more than 2,000 restaurant concepts being tracked and more than 6 millions consumer interactions over a recent 90-day period.

Tracking the main social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp and YouTube, SocialCoCo determined its rankings of the most influential U.S. restaurant brands in terms of social media and engagement.

The Web site also used algorithms from Klout and other third party systems, as well as its own algorithms in the consumer interaction scoring. Klout is the company that assigns each user of social media (Twitter, Facebook, and the like) a “score” to determine their influence in the online world. The more a person engages, the more people find that person interesting enough to respond, repost, or retweet that person’s information, the higher that person’s Klout score will go. Essentially, Klout is using various algorithms to determine one’s relevant worth in the online world.

Here’s the Top 20 most influential U.S. restaurant brands in the social media world, according to SocialCoCo:

1. Starbucks

2. McDonald’s

3. Taco Bell

4. Dunkin’ Donuts

5. Jimmy John’s

6. Subway

7. Cheesecake Factory

8. Baskin Robbins

9. Domino’s Pizza

10. Genghis Grill

11. AJ Bombers

12. Tasti Delight

13. Pizza Hut

14. The Coffee Bean

15. Naked Pizza

16. Chili’s

17. Jack in the Box

18. KFC

19. Camille’s Sidewalk Café

20. Wow Bao

Full disclosure: It should be noted that Social CoCo and Digital CoCo have partnerships with two brands that made the list: Genghis Grill and Camille’s Sidewalk Café.

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