Social Media Marketing for Restaurants – 6 Amazing Tips and Ideas

A growing number of restaurants use social media to build their business and attract customers from there. If you’re a restaurant or hotel struggling with fresh social media marketing ideas, then you’ve struck at the right places to read about interesting ideas and strategies of social media marketing for restaurants that you can employ to for a great social media presence. Read to know more about how social media can aid exponentially in leveraging your restaurant and hotel business-

1. Do An Account Takeover By An Industry Expert

Give access to your social media account, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to an industry expert. Research about experts from the culinary industry and do a guest takeover for a day or two. This gives your followers a taste of something ‘new’ with a fresh perspective.

Your audience stays tuned to your posts for those two days because –an industry expert, perhaps their favorite is going to introduce new ideas on the channel and it is something they definitely want to hear about. Industry experts can share cooking tips and tricks, do’s and don’ts of baking, etc. and organize engaging contests to keep the followers glued to the brand in return for exciting giveaways, prizes or food vouchers.

Bonus – An increase of followers additionally comes along where the expert’s followers will follow your account for updates and announcements. A great practice for social media marketing of a restaurant indeed we would say!

2. Go Behind The Scenes – What’s Cooking & Baking In The Kitchen

Today, customers are keen on learning how their dish is prepared or the chef behind the dish. Give your customers a sneak peek with ‘behind the scenes’ and let them engage with you with this. Develop a fun environment where you share videos and pictures of your chef and stewards readying up a weekly favorite or sharing easy ideas for cooking a dish.

Behind the scenes are not only limited to the kitchen of a restaurant. Show how you procure your groceries and vegetables from the local market, posting about your chef’s weekly highlight meal, the employee of the month and sharing funny narratives about the employees lets your customers feel more connected to your business.

Behind the scenes is a transparent and humane way of connecting with your customers. Also, customers love it when their favorite restaurant reaches out to them and lets them see what all goes on in the culinary business apart from the regular restaurant order and delivery.

3. Communicate- Respond To The Online Reviews

It is an impeccable social media marketing tip for restaurants to always monitor your social conversations on different channels and engage in them sincerely. Restaurant and hotel marketers must pay attention to responding to the comments, tagged posts, and tweets of their customers. Whether, good or bad reviews, all of them must be addressed by the restaurant’s social team. This practice comes across as receptive to the customers and people who are reading the reviews as a restaurant owner who is genuinely interested in the reviewer’s feedback.

Create a menu using editable menu templates and communicative persona online and address the negative feedback. This reassures the reviewer that their feedback is being considered by the hotel team and chances are he’ll drop-in again if you assure an improved service and state the cause of the poor service (if any). Your restaurant critic may turn into a brand advocate provided you pay heed to his written experience.

Respond to the positive comments and experiences as well by thanking your customers for dining in. A socially active brand is recognized more and chances are your business queries will begin flowing via social channels.

Also Read – Embed Yelp Reviews Widget On Website

4. Aim For Geo-Targeted Posts & Advertisements

The first thing an individual Google’s today is ‘near me’. This holds true for ‘restaurants and hotels ‘near me’ too. People choose to eat at restaurants and hotels near them or in close proximity. Invest in Geo-targeted advertisements that help you save money and ensure only people in a specific radius or a particular city see your advertisements by excluding non-relevant clicks on your advertisements which can cost you money.

Social media channels have improved settings and filters for narrowing your search and aiming for targeted areas only. Take advantage of these targeting features for your restaurant business. Twitter, for example, allows followers to narrow down hashtags by specific categories including posts such as “near you” help your potential customers find you better by adding a location-specific hashtag or mentioning your city in the post. This is indeed a best tip for social media marketing of small restaurants which are targetting only a single nearby location.

5. Use the Marvelous Customer-Generated Content (CGC)

Let your customers be your brand marketers and promoters. A restaurant hashtag lets customers post their pictures and videos of their visit and experience to the social media channels. #SuperBowlEats serves as a great hashtag for the restaurant that wishes to utilize user-generated content derived from the hashtag. A little digging into the social media channels with your hotel hashtag can give you some quality pictures and great reviews and experiences from your over own customers.

Sharing customer generated content builds the brand-user relationship and showcases your customers like your brand ambassadors. By sharing their posts, you encourage more and more customers to share their experiences via the hotel/restaurant hashtag and this gives you rich content for marketing on social channels. Multiple benefits reaped indeed along with free and authentic marketing content!

A brand can request its customers to also share their pictures via the restaurant hashtag and moreover the brand must consider rewarding some lucky customers with a free meal or discount vouchers.

Also Read: 7 Inspiring Examples of User Generated Content Marketing Campaigns

6. Display Your Hashtag Feeds with Social Walls

Create your restaurant’s social wall with the restaurant/hotel hashtag and display all your social media feeds derived from social platforms in a creative way on this wall. Social walls are interactive displays that can be installed in hotel hallways, restaurant waiting areas, restaurant walls, etc. Many hotel and restaurant owners are using social media aggregators to engage more guests.

These are engaging concepts to absorb guest attention and encourage social participation from customers. Social media signage work on the principal concept of extracting social media live feeds from different social channels and then their display on the social walls with customization themes, fonts, designs, etc.

Also Read: How Hotels use Social Media Walls to Engage more Guests

Conclusion

We’ve analyzed and written about top 6 ideas and tips for social media marketing for restaurants to drive effective results. This suits your business to increase more guests. We hope you’ve learned a little bit more about how to use social media in a beneficial way for Restaurants. You can follow these ideas for your upcoming social media campaigns. For more ideas on how you can take your restaurant marketing to the next level, check out our 8 Interesting Restaurant Marketing Tactics.