Social media marketing is one of the most important restaurant digital marketing strategies your company will ever need. Everyone is on social media these days, including your competitors and especially, your customers! You don’t want to miss out on a lot of free publicity by not having a place in social media.
Social media is all about interaction. Like, comment, share, or retweet is a chance to interact with your customers and keep your business on top of their minds. If you think about it, social media marketing is just a digital version of what you should be doing every day – communicating with your customers.
If you’re still thinking about which social media platforms you should be on and how you can grow your followers and engage with them using your content, then you’re in luck! We’ll be offering you sure-fire tips and a basic guide on social media marketing for your restaurants.
Social Media Platforms to Use
Generally, when people look for a good restaurant to dine in, they would browse Google. But if they’re really being savvy, they also want to know if that restaurant has a strong social media presence. This is why you need to be on top social media platforms. In this list, we’re going to discuss three of these platforms that are essential for many restaurants.
Facebook is considered to be one of the largest social media platforms with 2.4 billion users. This platform will give you a wide audience and a variety of options to interact with them.
Aside from the regular likes, comments, and shares, Facebook also allows your customers to leave reviews on your page, check-in at your location, tag you in posts, upload photos directly on your page, and contact you directly through Facebook messenger.
For restaurants, it is also a must to be on Instagram. This photo-sharing site is actually an advantage to many restaurants. For one, food photos are consistently ranked as one of the highest trends on Instagram. Second, hashtags are a great way to sort and categorize your photos making it easier for people to search for you. Also, when people post photos while dining at your restaurant, the posts are automatically tagged at your location.
For many restaurants, it’s helpful to get on Twitter to get up-to-date news on social media marketing and ideas for your own restaurant’s engagement. To do this, you first have to adopt some of the best practices that other local restaurants do in your area. These include following, responding to, and retweeting posts of other local businesses and the most active people on social media (those who post, retweet, and comment a lot about dining posts).
With Twitter, it’s also quite acceptable to post daily specials, menus, and events without annoying your followers.
Think About Your Content
The meat of social media marketing for restaurants is content. Anything you post such as your status, images, videos, and links will define how people look at your brand. So, it’s important to post quality content to build and grow your audience.
As an easy strategy, we can divide posts into three categories: Brand, Sales, and Shares.
Brand posts can be anything about your restaurant and the kind of brand image you’d like to project. These posts can be food photos, jokes, quotes, facts, behind-the-scenes, and just funny videos of your staff.
Sales posts are content that directly promotes your business. In other words, these are social media advertisements that aim to get people to buy your product or book your services. Some examples are your special dishes and event catering services with a call-to-action text at the end of the posts.
Share posts are content you share from other sources like news, blogs, or events. This can be good to help other local businesses you’ve partnered with to grow their traffic. It also suggests that your brand is not all about “YOU” as you care to share others’ content.
For more tips and ideas, we’ve written a separate blog about content marketing.
Build Your Followers
Once you’ve set up your accounts and have organized your content, you’re left with one thing to do— find your followers!
The most common mistake in building a following is not having a target market. Some businesses just follow people’s accounts, hoping they would follow back or maybe run an ad without specifying their target market. Yes, they end up with a great number of followers but with zero to little engagement. You don’t want that!
A smart way to build your followers is to first define your audience. Who are the right people for your business?
After that, you can search relevant hashtags to follow, interact with people, and perhaps run ads to the right market. Along the way, you might want to unfollow a few accounts that have not followed you back.
You may also tap the right influencers for your business and make sure they attract the audience you need.
A Quick Recap…
- Set up an account on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
- Create a content strategy containing these post categories: Brand, Sales, and Share.
- Build your followers based on your target market.
Social media marketing is a long-term restaurant digital marketing strategy. With consistency and patience, it will reap big results — a good relationship with your clients and regular high sales!
For more comprehensive social media marketing services, you can schedule your strategy session with Tulumi Digital Marketing.
