There’s a trend on TikTok involving Habib’s restaurant. People are stealing sfihas, posting on TIk Tok about it and getting hundreds of thousands of likes and views. What could have been a problem for us became an advantage, generating millions of likes and views on TikTok in an organic and far cheaper way.

Better than investing in media on social networks, we created a creative and cheaper way to promote the brand on the platform. We did the math, and it's 3x cheaper than conventional media. We invested an average of R$12 to impact 1,000 TikTok users, and each sfiha cost just R$0.30 to make. Each person steals 3 sfihas on average, and one user post on Tik Tok reaches around 200 users. Our cost per 1000 impacts on TikTok had just gone down to R$4 – sostolen sfihas are 3x cheaper than boosting TikToks. We were able to use data to save money (R$1,750,868.75) and get 35M views and counting.

There was a new TikTok trend going around – people were stealing sfihas from our all-you-can-eat service. And rather than trying to stop it, we encouraged clients to steal even more.

We developed an in-store strategy, inviting clients to take even more sfihas from our all-you-can-eat service and post about it on social media, helping to take the trend to the next level and saving money in the process.

After recognizing the trend on TikTok and how many views and likes it was generating, we began to implement our campaign in the chain’s restaurants in São Paulo. For 30 days, we promoted messages such as 'Go on, steal some sfihas from the all-you-can-eat' or 'You can steal the sfihas. We'll let you. All we ask is this: post a video on social media' on a variety of materials inside the restaurant, such as table displays and promotional tablecloths. During the campaign, videos were posted by our customers on social media, mainly on TikTok, totaling 500 videos and fueling the trend on the social network. A trend that was already big became even bigger, gaining an additional 35 million views in the wake of our campaign.

The campaign that encouraged customers to steal sfihas and post them on TikTok resulted in more than 500 videos, totaling 35 million views, hundreds of thousands of comments, and countless laughter in the videos, all done organically without spending a single cent on paid media. We also boosted traffic in our restaurants during the campaign, which went viral on social media and also through word of mouth, increasing all-you-can-eat orders by 20% during the campaign. In other words, we saved more than R$1,750,868.75 (US$349,973.75) in media and also increased restaurant profits, all without spending a single real beyond what went into making our sfihas. Rather than just amplifying an existing spontaneous trend, we inserted the brand into the social network in a cheap and very innovative way.