Word-of-mouth and old-fashioned advertising are no longer enough to maintain the stamina you need in the food and beverage industry. Hospitality is social by nature and nothing works better than social media for restaurants, if they want to attract new clients.
Many restaurants have made regular social media posts a daily routine. A Cornell University study found out that 59 percent of chain restaurants and 79 percent of independent restaurants use social media. Some restaurants are a little slower in developing their social media strategy. If your restaurant would describe itself as the latter, it’s never too late to build a social media presence and increase your brand awareness. If you’re not sure about the value of social media for your restaurant, bar or winery business, we put together a list of a couple ways it will benefit your restaurant.
1. Advocacy of your Brand
If you aren’t familiar with Foodstagramming, it is something worth looking into. SocialMediaToday stated that “food is the most photographed subject on Instagram”. There is no better way to build brand advocacy than to have customers post pictures of their entrees and generate buzz around your restaurant.
The most important instrument in increasing the value of your brand is social media.
2. Drive Demand with Location-Based Advertising
Businesses used to get by without advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Now, unfortunately, the game has changed. Business pages on Facebook must pay to play. No, that doesn’t mean you have to spend huge amount of money, but if you want to achieve ROI on social media you need to start advertising. Luckily, Facebook and Instagram ads are cheap. However setting the right targeting needs some knowledge.
3. Provides Guests with Restaurant Updates
Social media is one of the fastest ways to keep guests up-to-date about your restaurant. Manage your social media pages regularly with information on new menu items, specials, events, promotions, operation hours, etc.
If your restaurant is new to social media, it might be best to start off slowly. Choose one or two social media platforms and focus on building those. Once you have those established, you can move on to building other accounts. We will cover this topic in our next blog post.
4. Staying Connected with your Guests and potential Clients
One of the most important reasons a restaurant should have social media accounts is communication with their customers. Social media allows you to keep in touch and build a personal long-term connection with your customers.Keep in mind that, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%. The success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%
5. Gives You Insights Into Your Clientele
Social media for restaurants offers more than just the opportunity to promote your establishment. It also (and perhaps more importantly) provides you with a better glimpse into who your core customers are. Frequent posts on your accounts will give your followers a consistent reason to stay engaged with your restaurant.
From there, you can start to gain a better perspective into what your customers like, what they don’t, and how they interact with you online. This can be done by measuring the likes on a post, the number (and context) of comments, and whether or not your followers tag their friends when leaving a reply to what you publish. The more of these three interactions, the better.
You can also use social media analytics tools to dive deeper into the data on how well your pages perform. Every social media platform provides different readouts of the same basic data points: impressions (how many people saw your post), engagements (how many people liked, commented, or shared your post), and likes (a subsection of engagements). These analytics tools also allow you to see whether you’re gaining or losing followers, as well as your top-performing posts. From there, you can try to emulate your more successful posts in the future while phasing out underperforming content.
Getting Started on Social Media for Your Restaurant
Whether you’re at the initial stage to use social media for your restaurant, or you’re looking for a way to increase ROI on your efforts, there are plenty of approaches you can take that will provide a big lift for a small amount of work. It doesn’t matter which strategy you use, as long as you stay authentic to your restaurant brand and be there for current and future customers.
Useful links:
If you are new to the topic here is a Social media 101 Guide for Restaurants
Social media expert recommendations on “How to post on social media”