Did you just open a restaurant and are finding ways to promote it on a social media platform? Don’t worry this article will help you in finding easy ways to spread and promote your business on a social media platform like Facebook.
Whether you are a small coffee shop or a full-fledged restaurant serving diverse cuisines, Facebook marketing will help you attract new customers and engage your already build customer base. Facebook marketing may seem difficult for the people who have no experience in the past but it’s an easy solution to help you get the word out and fill seats with paying customers.
Facebook marketing makes sense for the budding restaurateurs because currently. Facebook has over 2 billion users and it’s where your customers are. Facebook marketing for restaurants is done to reach the customers in the area where your restaurant is located.
As Facebook is a platform where we connect with our friends and even strangers, 88 % of people trust what friends and strangers say on Facebook about business. 70% of purchases at the business can be traced back to social media.
When people share what they had for lunch or dinner or, where they went for their get together, birthday parties etc. these mentions matter a lot for your business. Food and drinks are a major part of any person’s celebrations like anniversary, birthdays, dates and holidays. Over 200 million Facebook posts are tagged as #food and 23 million people share pictures of their meals out. Many of them include specific brand mentions, which is a way of promoting the business organically through the customers themselves.
It sounds like your current customers are doing all the work for you, but if you are not going to be digitally present on such social media platforms then it’s hard for you to tap this enthusiasm.
Facebook marketing enables your restaurants business to make most out of these engagements. Turn mentions into more sales, more visits and even more word of mouth chatter. Get people sharing pictures of your speciality pasta bowls, sushi, salads, pizza or pastries.
Now let’s see how all this is done in easy ways
1) Engaging With Followers On Facebook
Social media marketing is the way to engage with customers and future prospects alike on Facebook because you are driving your traffic on social media platform, you don’t have to pay with every click like you with an advertisement.
Your business profile is your home base on Facebook and its where people will get to learn about you. The more will be the engagement, the more people will be attracted towards your profile and your business physical location.
This is how to set up a strong base to start building a social media presence for marketing your restaurants.
After that, the next step is to start completing your business profile by ensuring that you post several high-quality pictures of the interiors of your restaurants, the signature dishes and drinks that you are serving. Show the food in the best lighting because it will catch people’s eye. For the people who have not yet visited your restaurants, it will make a good impact and will leave a good impression and as we know the first impression is the last impression, it will stay in the viewer’s head for a long period of time.
You can also write catchy descriptions and titles for every category of foods and drinks that you’re serving. If you have been awarded or rated as one of the best in your field then make sure that it is mentioned in your business profile and eye catchy.
Mention your email, website link, business contacts on your business profile so that people can easily visit and like your page. You can also mention your restaurants address so that people can navigate and reach your place easily.
2) Build Your Initial Following
Here what you need to know to do it in an effective manner.
>Focus more getting followers organically. In order to make a Facebook presence to grow, you need people who actually like your restaurant. Buying followers don’t work in the long run because those are not going to visit your restaurants and it won’t help you in getting a real benefit from your followers.
>Be active on your page. Start posting regular content.
3) Set Up Your Facebook Menu
By using the menu tab plugin for Facebook to easily get orders online. Show your menu to people and get orders straight from Facebook, but make sure you have the management staff that can handle keep the tracks of all the online orders. It’s a different task from having a customer physically present in your restaurant counter. That’s true especially if it’s for a later pickup time.
4) Get Facebook Reviews
In order to analyze what dishes and drinks people like in your restaurant, you need to get a response from customers. On a platform like Facebook, you can get reviews from your customers that will help provide better quality and services to them. Reviews in a business profile provide a social proof that everyone can see how much others like your food and service. These reviews and star ratings will also appear in the search results of Google, making it visible for the people who are looking for a restaurant of a specific category.
Go to the settings on your Facebook page for allowing people to write reviews on your timeline. As reviews start coming in, respond to them in a professional manner. If the review is great then thank them for being a customer. But if it’s not good, be humble and consider your response carefully. Don’t lash out because you can end up losing more customers.
5) Try Live Streaming
Going live on your Facebook page for showing viewers your test kitchen is an interesting way of engaging people in your business.
On a special day like Valentine’s Day or Christmas, you can do a live stream in order to show people how dedicated your staff is in making special dishes to serve the customers. You can show them how much effort it takes to make sure that you serve your customers in the best possible way. Including a teaser in the video description also helps the viewers to get a brief of what the video is all about.
6) Combine Images And Graphs
Many restaurants like to add graphical elements to images of their food and drinks. It can be a scene from a movie or a cartoon, which add hints to a story so that people can relate to it. It is a very creative idea where you can play with images and colours in order to make your Facebook page look attractive and interesting.
You can add a graphic designer in your team or you can also make decent graphics on your own by easy to use software like Canva or Piktochart.
You can guide your diners through these graphics when you have a menu, which serves a different variety of same product, for example – diners like their coffee in different ways, possibly because customers tend to ask and wait for the staff to explain coffee combinations. So when diners know the difference between a piccolo and a macchiato, they know what to expect from their drink.
7) Tap On Pop Culture
Holding contests for movie tickets or match tickets will help the business to engage more customers as people who are movie buff or cricket fan, they will also visit your restaurants and will experience your service. This collaboration makes sense giving your restaurant a status of being associated with famous brands and organizations.
8) Take A Poll
Taking a poll is not a complicated process. Just choose a topic that will interest your customers or viewers- food. You can use the Facebook poll feature and post a question. You can ask your customers which variety they like the most in a specific category of food. Like a good social media poster, you should join the conversation. It would be great if you use both text and image to display the choices that people made during the poll. It will give you an idea as to how many people got engaged and what is there choice and preferences.
9) Sharing A Promo Code.
Trying promo codes for each campaign you run via Facebook which will not only enable you to drive sales but it will also give an idea of how effective your social media efforts are.
Talk with your customer service teams and sales team too, to discuss other promotional techniques and ideas, like loyalty programmes, cash discounts etc. Run all these offers on your Facebook Page so that people are always updated and are engaged.
10) Mention Your Business Partners
You can try teaming up with businesses that complement your restaurant. They can be ingredient suppliers, or event organizers or kitchen appliance makers. Tagging your partner’s pages build goodwill with your partners and also it increases the restaurant.
11) Facebook Fridays Events
Send an invitation to your exclusive group of Facebook fans to meet up at your restaurants at a specific time on Friday evening, and to make it a fun gathering to attend, you can offer drinks, foods, sneak peeks at new menu drawings and items.
12) Showcase Your Employees
People on social media are observing, they like to see what’s going on behind the scenes at your restaurant which makes them feel special and the part of the in-crowd. Post photos of your employees hard at work, or use your tablet or smartphone to create humorous, interesting videos with employee dialogue.
13) Promote Your Page With Facebook Advertisements
Facebook has a highly effective and intuitive ad manager that can help your restaurants reach massive amounts of potential guests. You don’t require a high budget to achieve success, even a couple hundred rupees is enough to reach a good sized local audience.
14) Booking Widgets
Booking widgets will provide your restaurants with an easy solution for receiving online reservations, by using a unique link across your social media you’ll be able to tap on the potential full booking of your restaurant. Features like SMS reminders will help to reduce over bookings and no-shows.
15) Share content from Instagram
If Facebook isn’t your thing, then you can share your posts and videos directly from Instagram on Facebook. This creates a steady stream of content on Facebook based off of your other social media platforms, which will enable the users of both Instagram and Facebook to view your content.
These are the simple yet effective ways through which you can use your social media handle for promoting your business and attracting new customers and engaging your current customers. Its the best way you can make use of your social media platform almost for free to have a wider impact of your business on your followers that will become your future customers.
