Why Social Media for Restaurants Is Increasingly Important
Before we get started with some great examples of social media for restaurants, let’s have a look at why social media marketing is important – especially for restaurants and cafes. Social media marketing has become important for restaurants because the owners get the chance of showing off their menus by using stunning visuals, building a positive impression of the shop, and keeping up with the clientele.
Good social media is going to combine the three traits (a good one is going to involve even more traits). These four tips below are going to be great, use them as pointers when you want to use a social media strategy to build out your restaurant.
1. Showing Off the Menu of Your Restaurant
The restaurant business is visually oriented the same way it is experience-driven. When looking to sell people on great food taste, you will need to also ensure the looks sells it too. When posting on social media, you have the chance of showing off the sizzle, which means you will be selling the (literal) steak.
The first step is ensuring you have great photos of your food. When taking photos, try to make them as good as possible, even if you have to do it in a well-lit area of your restaurant. When dressing your plate, try doing it in the most appetizing way possible.
People are going to judge how good your food is by looking at the images, which makes it very important to work on the visual advertisement. Plan appropriately. For inspiration take a look at Properpopcorn.com, the marketing of their gourmet popcorn has helped their business to grow.
When you have those great photos of your specials, ensure the writing on the menu has been done in a way that highlights the thing that makes it great. You should not be afraid to go into detail: the goal here is trying your best to describe the food in a way that makes the audience feel like they are tasting the food while looking at it from a screen.
If you don’t know how to get started with writing a good description of the food, then write it the way you would train the staff to talk to customers about the dish.
2. Social Media Insights into Your Clientele
Social media is more than just a marketing tool to use in promoting the business. It is also a great tool you can use to learn more about your core customers. Knowing more about your customers will allow you to know how you can cater to them and leave them happy.
You need to post on a consistent basis so that your followers will have a reason to keep engaging with your restaurant.
With this, you will have a good place to gain a better perspective on what your customers want, what they don’t like, and how they are interacting with you on social media. You can measure this by looking at the number of likes you are getting on your post, the number of comments, and whether your followers are tagging their friends when leaving a reply on your post. The more the better.
There are social media analytics tools you can use when diving deeper into data and how the pages are performing.
There are a lot of social media platforms out there, but there are some basic data points common in all of them: impressions (the number of people who have seen the post), engagement (the number of people who have commented, liked, or shared the post), and likes (this is the subsection of engagements).
The analytics tools will let you know whether you are losing or gaining followers, and also the best-performing posts. You will be able to emulate the most successful post while avoiding content that doesn’t perform that well.
3. Promoting on the Cheap on Social Media
Once you have a social media presence that is both consistent and engaging, it is time to take it to the next level by advertising. In the past, you had to take out an ad on the newspaper, a local magazine, radio, or television network when you wanted to advertise your business, but this is no longer the case.
Social media has become a game-changer because it gives you the chance of delivering the ads to a specific audience that you wouldn’t have been able to do on an ad on the local TV.
Social media marketing with the right company can be great for your restaurant, and there are some free tools that will help in identifying strengths and weaknesses in your social media marketing according to here.
The goal of the ad might be gaining followers (this way you will be able to reach a wider organic audience), promote event nights or specials, or even soliciting people to book a table from their social media account. You have the option of pinpointing the advertisement to people in specific zip codes, cities, followers of your competitors, or even tastes in food.
You will be able to have a high return investment if you manage to select the right-sized audience for the ads.
If you don’t feel confident venturing into paid social advertising, you can just start by promoting to your followers, which is free. Remember to create Facebook events for special occasions at the restaurants so you can promote them.
By doing this, you will get the chance of knowing what promotions work and what don’t.
4. Talking to Your Clientele
A restaurant job is people-centric, even though you might not have enough time to go around the tables asking customers whether they are enjoying their meal.
Social media can make things easier for you because you can engage reviewers on Google and Yelp and commenters on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The customers are going to feel appreciated because you took the time to that.
Spurring conversations with fans and replying to reviewers is a good strategy, but you need to do it in the right way. You should be careful when replying to negative reviews because you might seem defensive.
Replying to every comment on your post will make you seem over-eager. Make sure the comments are informative: answer questions about the restaurant, offer the negative reviewer a chance to talk in a direct message, or over email.
Social media marketing is a great tool that will benefit your restaurant.
