Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises (Lettuce) is a Chicago-based, family-owned restaurant group operating dozens of brands and more than 85 restaurants nationwide. Beyond its day-to-day restaurants, Lettuce also owns and operates Windy City Smokeout, Chicago’s premier country music and barbecue festival that draws thousands of attendees and requires live social coverage, guest engagement and timely event updates.

With that many distinct restaurant identities and event brands, brand management had become fragmented: individual location pages, dozens of native platform logins and no easy way to prove social’s value to the operators and leadership running each piece of the business.

The clarity that changed their calls

One brand was running separate location pages alongside its main account. Lettuce’s team put the two side by side in Sprout Social and compared how each performed.

Sprout helped us compare the accounts and make a more informed decision about where to focus our efforts. For this brand, bringing the location pages together made more sense for our guests and our team.
Brittany Saito
Divisional Director of Marketing at Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

The pattern was clear: engagement, reach and community were getting diluted across separate pages instead of collecting into one stronger, more authoritative presence. The location-specific approach also demanded more effort for less return, while the original account kept growing at a steady pace. Once the data made the tradeoff obvious, folding those pages into the main brand was an easy call.

Building on that data-centric decision, the team used Tagging in Sprout Social to track performance across brands and locations, and to pull every location’s content performance and guest communications.

That was a real shift in how we work. [Tagging] allowed us to get deeper insights and more accurately track what’s actually performing, as well as surface what guests are consistently mentioning across our channels.
Tess Conforti
Divisional Senior Marketing Manager at Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

When the weekend won’t wait

For Lettuce’s live events, such as the Windy City Smokeout, social operates on a completely different clock. Sprout Social acts as a live monitor of feedback across channels, giving the team access to issues before they escalate and serving up answers to questions immediately. Bridging live event experiences with digital responsiveness delivers the best of hospitality in both worlds.

The team averages about 8K+ inbound messages during Smokeout weekend with a 100% action rate. That speed also allows the team to engage quickly and directly when needed, like when severe weather rolls in: emergency updates or schedule changes go out to thousands of attendees at once, making every second count for safety as well as managing customer expectations and experiences.

During Windy City Smokeout, Sprout Social serves as a real-time temperature check and customer service channel. It allows us to monitor feedback instantly, act immediately, and deliver the high level of hospitality essential to and expected of the Smokeout brand.
Abbie Judge
Corporate Social Media Manager at Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

Because event audiences stay hyper-engaged online all weekend—sharing thousands of photos and videos while still on-site—the team also treats social as a live sales tool, publishing anywhere from 60 to 140 posts and Stories each day to drive last-minute ticket sales and promote add-on experiences and upcoming events. Working at that volume from within Sprout Social keeps the team’s attention on content quality rather than on the mechanics of getting it published.

Letting the data lead

Today the Lettuce team runs social across its brands with portfolio-wide benchmarks that show each operator where they actually stand, and they proactively monitor performance to fold location-specific pages back in wherever the data says a separate presence is splitting an audience rather than growing them in parallel. That same team carries the executive reporting cycle alongside management of high-volume community engagement, support and sales during festival weekends. It’s proof that a centralized, data-backed strategy can create efficiency and value for both the business and its audience, whether in support of one brand… or dozens.

See how Sprout Social helps multi-brand and multi-location teams. Book a demo.