Today around thousand apps and sites exist with a lot of subscribers, so why don`t we use them to attract new customers? Marketing companies notice a huge impact, that the internet has, and start to provide own politic on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even messengers. This marketing is differed from tradition one by opportunities to leave own feedback and see from other people, a product could have a rate, a customer could straight contact with you. In the internet we can promotion not only regular products, but catering, so there are some social media for restaurants also.
How United Nation says, more than 3 billion people have an internet; around 1.5 billon people are registered only on Facebook, so all of them could be your potential customers. It`s not only one strong side of social media bars, also people more trust an information on web sites than ads on TV. Also restaurant social media doesn`t need such money, so almost every company could have own internet page.
If you analyze the restaurant social media marketing strategies of popular companies or even your close competitors, you will notice their emphasis on restaurant social media strategy. All of them have many pages on various Internet resources. Some small companies rely solely on social media strategy for restaurants, because customers really like that level of contact and freedom when viewing information. This is a big plus, because traditional advertising as flyers, advertisings on TV and newspapers annoy people more, than helps to sell your services or goods.
“To be or not to be” in the restaurant social media?
Of course, not many people have a lot of free time to devote it to creating a company page, so you should ask the question, “Is the using of social media marketing for restaurants judiciously?” if we have small businesses and we cannot allocate a lot of resources? Let’s calculate how much money and time is needed to fill up the pages of our restaurant on various internet resources.
Take for example one of the main social media for restaurants today – Facebook. It has a lot of users and has wide range page’s settings. Creating a page in this restaurant social media has typical processes (enter the name of the company, date of foundation, address, etc.), on which we will not make attention in this topic. But the first thing you have to do is choose the category of the page, in our case it will be “company or brand”, because we will use social media marketing for restaurant. Then you should enter “restaurant” below (you can even specify your cuisine – Mexican, Japanese, French, etc.). The next step is to choose photos of our profile, here people usually upload the company’s logo, then you need to decide on the cover, there may be nicely served dishes, or an atmospheric restaurant hall. And in fact, the first brick in our social media strategies for restaurants page is planted.
The next thing, that we recommend, is to fill our page with materials, photos, videos, messages. Obviously you have photos of the presentation of your dishes, staff, regular customers, photos from different events etc. If you have some discounts or happy hours, you can also inform customers about it, through publications on the restaurant social media page. In the “About” tab, you can add the contact information so that people can ask their questions or just book a table. In addition to all the functions related with customers, we can publish open positions for stuff recruitment.
Visit the settings tab, which is in the upper right corner, where you can see all the nuances related with the work page. We recommend to put immediately the tincture “Disable posts by other people on the Page”, this will save you from spam and unnecessary messages. Also set “Page Roles”, where you can delegate functions to customize the restaurant social media page. In the future, we will be able to buy ads from this resource, which will attract even more customers.
As you can see, all this will take no more than an hour, and you will already have a ready page with which you can advertise your company. In addition, there are several restaurant social media, although they do not have so many users, but are rapidly gaining them. This is Instagram, a specialized network for publishing photos and short videos. There is even easier to create a profile, you don’t really need to provide any data, you can write them in the description and put your photos and under them you can make descriptions and leave hash tags. These hash tags are very important in this social network, and restaurant marketing this is one of the main instrument to get views on your post. Finding the necessary hash tags is very simple, you can go to the website for generating a hash tag and enter simply the word “restaurant”, then you will have about 50 options that you can just copy and paste under the photo.
The next network is Twitter, creating for small short messages. Make a profile is also not a problem like in other social media for restaurants. Here, people and companies publish something short and important. In our case, it may be, for example, a special offer, something new in the menu, or an event.