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Do you work for, manage or own an eating establishment? Do you want to know how to use social media to market your restaurant? It’s a common problem - restaurants want to be engaging with their clientele; they want to use social tools to get more patrons walking through their doors - but they just don’t know how. Adding social media to your marketing mix can hugely increase awareness about your restaurant, generate motivated engagement with your food, and get you more customers in your door. In this presentation, I'll show you 21 actionable tactics and tips for using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to market to your customers.
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21 Tips: Social Media Marketing for Restaurants
Table of Contents
Facebook Marketing1
2 Instagram Marketing
Twitter Marketing3
Other Social Sites4
Facebook Marketing1
Facebook Marketing for Restaurants
Facebook provides an incredible opportunity for establishments to connect with their clientele.
Your patrons are here - and most of them are checking their updates a few times a day.
Facebook is a place where people go to ‘hangout’ with friends. That’s why they go out to eat too, right?
7 Facebook Tips:
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2Facebook Tabs:Use tabs on your Facebook Page to entice people to visit your eatery. The first four tabs in particular are key - these are the tabs that show up on your front page (without clicking to open them all).
Cover image: You have 851x351 pixels to market your business, for free. Include delicious photos of your food, or people having a good time while eating with friends. You could change your cover image whenever you have a menu change, and market the new items or specials.
7 Facebook Tips:
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Exclusive Offers and Deals:Post exclusive offers on your Facebook Page. Give deals to patrons if they “like” your Page. Give group deals (using a third party app, as per Facebook rules), to entice your Fans to share your deal with their friends - and get those friends to become Fans of your Page too. A group deal can lead to immediate foot traffic into your establishment too!
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Photos of Food: The most shared posts on Facebook are images. You’re in the business of food, and food is a very visual thing. Be sure to include lots of images of your food in your regular Facebook updates. You could even create a lookbook of your current menu items.
7 Facebook Tips
5Contests and Sweepstakes:Use social sweepstakes and contests on your Facebook Page. These social promotions add excitement, and a great reason to get your customers coming back to both your Facebook Page, and your restaurant.
Here’s an example from a client using our sweepstakes app. Wayne Gretzky’s Toronto ran a geo-targeted sweepstakes through Facebook to successfully generate awareness of their newly renovated digs, and their brand new menu.
7 Facebook Tips
6Geo-target Ads: Facebook ads lets you do all kinds of very specific, niche targeting. For restaurants and diners, this is ideal. You can target your ads to be seen only by Facebookers in your particular geographic location. You can also target your ads to be seen by those with specific likes, and by those who like certain pages.
Embed Videos: Videos are very cool when embedded directly into an update, or in a tab. If you have videos about how your food is made, or you have an interview with your chef/ food suppliers/ happy customers - include them in an update.
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Instagram Marketing2
Instagram Marketing
Instagram is a hugely popular photo sharing site.
With its seamless integration with Facebook, it’s used about 95% of the time when your patrons are posting images to their Facebook friends.
You can use Instagram in conjunction with your Facebook tactics, or you can use the site on its own.
Here are seven tips for using Instagram marketing, on its own.
7 Instagram Tips
1Trending Hashtags: To increase awareness about both your Instagram profile, and your restaurant, include relevant trending hashtags. For example, if it happens to be #nationalcheesecakeday , and your culinary delights include cheesecake, post a scrumptious photo of it.
2 Niche Hashtag: Get found more easily by your niche market by using specific hashtags. For example, if you’re a bakery in New York, use geographic specific tags, like #sohoeats. Instagram is a mobile social site. Including a specific location in your tags can get found by foot traffic looking to eat, just outside your door.
3 Campaign Specific Hashtags: When you’re running a particular marketing campaign (such as a contest or group offer), create a tag just for that promotion. This lets your followers - and anyone else - engage with your campaign by using your hashtag in their posts, too.
7 Instagram Tips
4 Photos of Menu: Instagram is a site of photos. Use this opportunity to post delicious photos of your menu items.
5Engage with menu items: Take photos of you menu one step further - get your customers to upload their favourite items, to help build your menu of images on the site.
This type of user generated content not only gets your customers involved with you socially, it creates a stronger bond and customer loyalty.
7 Instagram Tips
6Employee appreciation: Take a photo of your staff working with your product or menu items. It could be a chef, a waitress, or even a busboy. Post them to your company Instagram feed, with a short description.
Use these types of photos to show that you’re an establishment that values the people that work for you.
At the same time, you’ll likely create a cool working environment for your staff!
It also shows that you’re a fun place, and likely with great customer service.
7 Instagram Tips
Photo Contests: If you want to gain a lot of user generated content (UGC), set up a photo contest - on Instagram. A photo contest can motivate your customers to engage with you, your menu items, and your restaurant. They can generate a lot of customer loyalty, as someone who takes a photo and submits it in your contest will care if they win or not. They will likely think about that photo and your menu item and your place for a least a little bit of time.
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Here’s an example of how a local gourmet cafe used a photo contest and a $15 gift card to get UGC from their dedicated customers:
Twitter Marketing3
Twitter Marketing
Twitter is a very successful marketing tool for restaurants, both large and small and from high end to fast food (including street trucks).
With only 140 characters per update, tweets get read, and shared at a phenomenal, immediate rate. Twitter is also used a lot through mobile.
How can you best promote your culinary delights on this site?
Here are seven tips for your restaurant Twitter marketing.
7 Twitter Tips:
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2Hashtags: Hashtags are very popular on Twitter too. Include them in your updates. Use similar tactics to the ones mentioned above with Intstagram.
Tip: You don’t want too many tags (given the character constraints on this platform - you want to leave room in your tweets to get RT’s and shares with @mentions - so a friend can send your tweet to a friend).
Include a link to your menu: Include links in your tweets. This gives your followers further action to take, and lets them interact with your more. Include a link to your menus, so your Followers can make an easy choice of dining with you. Tip: This is especially great if you deliver!
7 Twitter Tips:
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4Group offers: Promoting your establishment through coupons and discounts has long been a part of successful marketing.
Add in a social element, and make it a group deal - and you could have a viral campaign on your hands. You could, for example, run a group offer for a free appetizer. This will encourage your patrons to share your group offer tweet to their friends - and it will drive people into your eatery.
Include images of your food: Although Twitter is a text based site, updates with photos in them get shared, can get you more followers on Twitter , and can drive traffic into your establishment.
Here’s an example of a scrumptious and delicious looking image from La Dolce Vita:
7 Twitter Tips:
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6Use Promoted tweet: Choose your best tweets, and pay to promote them to a targeted audience. This is particularly effective for your timed updates being sent out around meal times. Check out how Merridees cleverly uses this tactic to promote their daily lunch specials.
Time your tweets: Send out tweets close to breakfast, lunch and dinner times. Unlike Facebook, your tweets will show up in Followers’ feeds immediately as you send them. Invite your followers to join you for your special deal for Twitter followers. And use hashtags for the meal times, like #lunch or #dinner. It makes it even easier to find you on a Twitter search. Remember: think like your customer!
7 Twitter Tips:
7Geo-target your ads: The only problem with the Merridees tweet, above, is that they are located in Tennessee, and I am not. It is incredibly important to geo-target your ads on Twitter. If your place of dining is located in Seattle - make sure you check off the geo-targeting location of Seattle when you are paying for your promoted tweets.
Getting your message to the right patrons in the right location is particularly true for your mobile users. You might just reach your customers as they are walking by your door!
Other Social Sites4
5 Other Social Sites for Restaurants:
1 Pinterest
2 Blog
3 YouTube
4 Yelp
5 FourSquare
More Social Media Marketing Tips:
1 Facebook:8 Sure-Fire Facebook Post Formulas That Drive EngagementThe 5 Most Common Facebook Post Mistakes5 Sure-Fire Facebook Contest Idea Formulas
2 Instagram:5 Best Types of Instagram Photos to Drive Engagement[INFOGRAPHIC] How Much Engagement Are Top Brands Getting on Instagram?Complete Guide to Instagram Marketing for Bars & Nightclubs
3 Twitter:52 Methods: How to Get Your Tweets RetweetedThe 9 Most Common Mistakes on Twitter[Infographic] The Top 7 Tips to Get More Followers on TwitterTweeting Content about your Company (and how not to)
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