CorpComms Magazine

Domino's, the UK's leading pizza delivery company, has announced a 29 per cent rise in pre-tax profits to £17.5 million, swelled by e-commerce sales and lucrative links to Foursquare and Facebook.

The e-commerce business has grown by 61 per cent in the period and sales online accounted for 33 per cent of total sales over the last quarter.

Chris Moore, chief executive officer of Domino's Pizza, attributed the success to 'innovative marketing' over the past year, adding: 'We have now been in business for 25 years and those years of experience give us the foundation from which we can seize every opportunity.'

Moore added: 'Our main Facebook site now has in excess of 36,000 fans and there are numerous fans of individual store sites too. In addition, we have led the way with social media initiatives such as affiliate marketing, our superfans programme and the development of a link up with Foursquare, the location-based social media site.'

In February this year Domino's launches a Facebook superfans app, rewarding brand loyalty with special offers and prizes. The boy and girl to recruit the most new fans to the site in a given week are crowned Superfan King and Queen and win free snacks. The Domino's widget also allows you to earn some dough every time a friend places an order via your Facebook, Myspace or blog page.

In May, the pizza delivery company struck up a deal with the location-based social networking site Foursquare offering regular users of the application free pizzas and discounts when visiting their stores.

The fast food company also emphasises the speed of its delivery, with an online pizza tracker allowing customers to watch the progress of their food from oven, to box, to bike to doorstep.

Georgina Wald, corporate communications manager at Domino's Pizza, noted that the rate of growth of e-commerce has also risen considerably since last year. 'This is just a gut feeling but I think you'd expect higher growth in the early days because you're beginning from a much smaller base. So I was really surprised by these results.

'Admittedly, there was also a significant rise in overall sales so some of this is just down to the fact that we were selling more pizzas in general. But some must be driven by our social media activities. Some weeks we were seeing 39 per cent of our sales delivered online and that's a massive figure.'

With a host of original social network based sales initiatives, Domino's has delivered digital dividends even after one of the earliest corporate social media disasters, when a pair of employees in North Carolina uploaded a film of themselves tampering with the pizzas onto YouTube. Asked whether the incident had spurred the company on to harness the same media that had been used against it, Wald said: 'It made us more aware and probably sped up the process but I don't think it changed anything. It just increased the urgency.'

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