Two restaurant chains getting all the social buzz

Restaurants get a lot of chatter on social, so I thought I'd look into the publicly traded restaurant companies to see who's getting the buzz…

Here are some restaurant chains people talk about on social:

People talk about Olive Garden (owned by Darden) a lot…. Cracker Barrel, not so much.

Also interesting are the positive social sentiment numbers for these companies.  All of them are in respectable range, with Cracker Barrel the lowest at 83% positive and Bloomin Brands (think Outback Steakhouse) the highest at an impressive 92% positive.

Of course, these give us a baseline to work off of. What's important here isn't the raw volume around these brands, but rather any consumer shifts we see in the future.

For example, if we start to see a steady increase in Cracker Barrel social volume while sentiment remains high, we'll know something interesting is going on at the stores.  On the flip-side, if mentions of Darden-owned restaurants start to slip, we will have a clue that comps might not be up to Wall St expectations, like we saw withTesla last quarter.

Again, it's all about consumer shifts.  What happens to these restaurants from the baseline is what will tell us when it's time to take a look for opportunities in the stock.  

That's what LikeFolio is all about — using social data to find opportunities that Wall St hasn't noticed… yet.

— Andy Swan is the founder of LikeFolio, which searches all of Twitter for important shifts in consumer behavior around the brands owned by publicly-traded companies.