Your customers are on social media, and your restaurant should be too. Restaurants are increasingly using social media to promote their restaurant, bring in new customers, and keep bringing back existing customers.
In addition, social media is used to communicate with customers to inform them about promotions and limited-time offers, build their credibility, and, most importantly, grow in the competitive restaurant industry. Keep reading to get the best tips to master and effectively connect with your target audience on social media.
1. Respond To Online Reviews: It is essential to respond to customer reviews, whether positive or negative. Your restaurant can create a transparent and friendly persona online by addressing negative reviews and showing appreciation for the positive ones.
For negative reviews, take the conversation offline and look deeper into the cause of the negative review. Customers will appreciate hearing from you and sense that you are concerned that they had a negative experience. Negative reviews have the potential to turn unhappy customers into brand advocates if you resolve their issues and show them that you truly care.
2. Repost User-Generated Content (UGC): UGC is photos, videos, and other forms of content your guests make that show your brand in a positive light. It can be customers taking pictures of their food, capturing a moment, or just a couple of friends or family enjoying the dining experience.
You can repost any UGC you find online about your restaurant if you credit the original author in the social media post. You can start a hashtag campaign on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Reposting great photos and other positive content about your restaurant ensures you’re in line with your brand. So keep it lighthearted, excited, and appreciative of the positive feedback.
3. Host Social Media Contests: There are many contests you can run on social media. Ask guests to participate in fun trivia questions, riddles, fill-in-the-blanks, photo contests, captions, etc. Social media contests engage customers. In addition, people are often drawn to various contests because they offer the opportunity to save money and earn a prize.
Offer a giveaway of any special drink/dish or combo meal or offer a gift card to a lucky winner who tagged their friend in their Facebook/Instagram post comments. It will be a great way to get users' attention and allow you to grow engagement and followers on your social media platforms.
If you offer a limited-time combo, running a social media giveaway that requires sharing your post and tagging friends can be a great way to promote your combo to a large audience and show it to thousands of online user.
Here are more reasons why your restaurant needs social media contests.
4. Create A Social Media Calendar: A social media calendar can be more than just great pictures of your food or drinks. Your social media posts can engage, entertain, and ask customers to take actions such as sharing your offers or engaging with your contests.
Plan your post for holidays and weekends and focus on seasonal menu items. In addition, you can highlight promotions you are running, e.g. food combos, party combos, or even promotions to share a review and get a free appetizer, or social media challenges or competitions.
Finally, don’t forget to optimize user-generated content (Images or videos) in the post. It will show that you connect with your guests and show other guests that you are in touch with your community.
A social media calendar should include the day and time you want to post. It will help you schedule your social media posts when your target audience is online. In addition, it helps streamline the entire process from creation to publication, accommodating all the specific needs of the particular platform.
5. Ask For Word-Of-Mouth Marketing: Don’t feel shy about asking your happy customers to spread the word about your services online. It is getting harder for brands to get their content seen on social media, so getting your fans to share your content can lead to huge boosts in engagement. You can also ask them to leave you a review on Google or Facebook if you find they are happy with their dining experience.
Running a campaign that offers customers a free dessert or appetizer can be a rewarding experience. In addition, it will help your restaurant to get more reach by getting more online reviews and more shares of your posts.
6. Use Social Media Tools To Monitor Your Brand: There are a variety of free and commercial solutions that make social media marketing more accessible than ever before. They will allow you to manage your social media accounts through a single interface or tool.
They will make all parts of social media administration easier for marketers and improve customer communication, content scheduling and publication, data analysis, and report generation.
Here are some options to help you get started:
Hootsuite
Google Alerts
Talkwalker
Reputology
Mentionlytics
7. Feature Behind The Scenes Content: Even the best food pictures can feel impersonal after a while. Refresh your feed and impress your audience by posting behind-the-scenes content. Share backstage moments and stories, display your staff, and put them. Show the people behind the magic.
Make sure the kitchen is spotless when you film and showcase your most mouthwatering dishes. You can choose to show the whole process of making a dish and upload it to YouTube; even a 10-second clip of frying calamari can be practical.
8. Work With Influencers: Influencers have an eager audience ready to try something new based on the influencer's recommendations. Sourcing local influencers to highlight your restaurant’s food and ambiance is a highly effective way of reaching your target audience locally.
Ask the influencers to share some words about your restaurants. If you’ve never done this before, here are some ways you can collaborate with influencers:
See how influencer marketing is necessary for your restaurant.
9. Use Paid Ads: Consider using paid ads to take your restaurant's social media marketing to the next level. Paid advertising can bring your restaurant in front of many qualified customers. In addition, the correct social media marketing approach will result in increased traffic, better SEO, higher conversion rates, improved brand loyalty, and constant updating.
With paid ads, the possibilities are endless. If your restaurant is not running paid ads, you are missing out. You may run unique ads on each social media platform. You may use engagement ads to reach the right target audience with your posts.
Run page-like campaigns to grow your followers. Or you may use reach ads to create brand awareness and post reach. You can also target individuals with specific demographics, interests, or geographic locations.
10. Host Competitions: Utilize social media contests & giveaways. Brands utilize competitions as another sort of content to engage their audience and expand their reach. Restaurants do it too. Create a unique topic and invite participants to share your post to help spread the news about your business or start an event like “Share to Win” or ”Like, follow and win” these will capture users' attention.
11. Spotlight Your Employees: Spotlighting your employees is great to show the human element of your restaurant on social media. It shows your potential guests that you care about your staff as individuals and that you celebrate their strengths. Let people know who makes their favorite pasta or which barista provides their favorite cup of coffee. Allow people to connect your business with exceptional employees.
Share your appreciation for employees, and you should show off your staff's skills and talent and entice new guests to try your fantastic food.
12. Cross-Promote Your Social Media Channels: You should not rely solely on one social media platform for your restaurant. Cross-promotion is perfect if one of your social media channels gets more engagement and interaction than the others.
Make Online Ordering Available On Social Media: Provide online ordering links in your posts’ call to action and your social media bio. Online ordering and delivery systems provide the restaurant with a complete sales channel. As a result, the restaurant can use it to increase profits and improve organizational efficiency. It also helps restaurant owners to save money on labor and the space required to service these guests.
Having a social media presence, implementing best practices to utilize it as a marketing channel allows you to stay connected with your customers. It will enable you to interact with customers even when they aren’t with you. Entice customers by adding promotions and incentivize them to leave reviews or visit your restaurant. Utilize the social media tips we have provided to get in front of your target audience and keep them engaged.
Have a question or want us to help you achieve your social media objectives?