By Charlie Pogacar
A few months ago, Boom’s Pizza in Cleveland had its Instagram account compromised and deleted. The two-shop brand, founded in 2023, lost all of its 10,000 followers in the process. Owner and operator Ben Bebenroth went to work communicating with Meta, trying to recover his account—efforts that were ultimately unsuccessful.
While that was happening in the background, Bebenroth was closely monitoring his sales figures. Wouldn’t losing his Instagram account lead to a huge dip in business?
But a funny thing happened: Sales remained steady. If anything, they steadily grew—after all, Boom’s Pizza had won “Best New Restaurant in Lakewood” and then “Best Pizza in Cleveland” in 2023. In other words, it was a buzzy brand that sold itself, no Instagram posts necessary.
Related: Insta-famous: How to Supercharge Your Pizzeria’s Instagram Presence
Like many pizzeria operators, Bebenroth had long viewed Instagram as a necessary evil. So now he began wondering: Did he even need it? “I was kinda like, who gives a [care]?” Bebenroth said. “We clearly don’t need one! I mean, people were still lining up for pizza, and 38% of our orders came through online. We never even saw a dip in business.”
It was a perhaps unlikely figure who talked Bebenroth out of ditching social media altogether: His realtor, Eric Purcell of Citirock. Purcell has been a driving force in helping Boom’s Pizza work towards a goal of opening five locations within five years. And having an Instagram account, Purcell reminded Bebenroth, was a key piece of that growth formula.
“He reminded me that our following on Instagram was a big reason why we got such a great deal on our Van Aken space,” Bebenroth said, referring to Boom Pizza’s second location at Van Aken Market Hall, a social district in Shaker Heights. “Our online presence showed the landlord that we had an established, loyal customer base, and that carried weight.”
In other words, Purcell and Bebenroth were able to illustrate, via metrics from Instagram and Toast, that a landlord would be lucky to have a Boom’s Pizza location. So while the thought of permanently logging off of social media was a liberating idea to Bebenroth, he was ultimately persuaded it wasn’t an option, especially if he wanted to continue to scale the business. It wasn’t just about the analytics either. Even if Instagram wasn’t directly driving sales, it was giving his brand credibility with consumers.
“To be the best new restaurant in the city, and to have the best pizza in the city, and then to have somebody click on your Instagram page—which is where all millennials go before they eat—and then they see, ‘Oh, they only have 500 followers,’” Bebenroth said. “They’re going to be like, ‘Is this even the right business?’ Unfortunately, they think like that. So, as much as I hate to say it, in order to be valid, you have to be seen as valid. And your Instagram following is a huge part of that.”
So Bebenroth restarted with a new Instagram handle. Having only been able to grow the followers to about 500 after several weeks, he knew he needed to try something different. In his own words, posting to 500 followers was like yelling into the void. So he enlisted the help of Cleveland Vibes, a social media agency with 200,000 followers on Instagram. For about $1,400, the agency committed to organically growing Boom’s Pizza’s follower count to 10,000 or more by the end of 2024.
The first collaborative post Cleveland Vibes ran addressed the issue head on: Boom’s Pizza had suffered a tragedy, the post said. In order to regrow its following, the pizzeria offered $500 in gift cards for those following the account and commenting on the post. That post alone has more than 5,000 likes and 7,000 comments. Just one week later, Boom’s Pizza has regrown its following from about 500 to over 4,300.
But how does Bebenroth know the followers are an engaged, active base of people with intent to buy his pizza? His response to this was surprising. “Don’t care,” Bebenroth said. “Honestly, I think it’s all [ridiculous]. It’s all like a self-serving algorithm to sell ad revenue. It’s just basically like, dude, if you’re getting followers, you’re getting views, and if you’re getting views, you’re getting shares. And by that, I just have to believe, like, the rising tide lifts all boats. If half of them are Iranian bots, I don’t give a [care]. Do the bots eat pizza?”
As to who may have compromised and deleted his pizzeria’s Instagram account, Bebenroth has no idea. With the help of some IT experts, he did a forensic audit. The results were inconclusive, but Bebenroth did learn one pivotal lesson, one he hopes other pizzeria operators who run Instagram accounts can learn from.
“The main thing we found while we were digging was that one manager was signing on to Instagram from his personal computer at home, on his own server outside of our network, outside of our security software,” Bebenroth said. “So, you know, from a lessons-learned perspective that could go out into the pizza-verse and help the next person, that’s the one thing I would say: Just make sure all of your content, all of your business management stuff is happening from a protected network because we think that’s how it happened.”
