Twitter & Instagram Social Media Tips For Restaurateurs

Every restaurant owner is aware of the potential power of social media to help drive traffic and build strong relationships with community members. Using social media effectively, however, is a skill that must be built. Twitter and Instagram can be particularly powerful for restaurant social media campaigns. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you make the best use of these powerful mediums.

Keep Your Personal and Business Social Media Accounts Separate

There are a couple of reasons why it’s smart to separate your personal and business social media accounts. The most obvious advantage is that keeping your business accounts separate allows you to delegate the work of keeping them current to someone else. Your personal accounts should be used both to promote your restaurant’s posts, as well as to develop your own unique voice and personal relationship with your followers. Your personal feed is an opportunity for you to post other things that are of interest to you, and for your customers to get to know you on a more personal basis. It’s also important that you write your own tweets for your personal account—it doesn’t come off as authentic if it’s not really your voice.

If you have multiple restaurant locations, allow each team to manage their own social media personalities, community and campaigns. Take the time to educate your teams so that they really understand what you are trying to do with social media, and empower them to represent the restaurant’s brand in a fun and authentic way.

Last, but not least, always take the time to proofread your posts –both business and personal –before you publish them. Like everything else that you post to the Internet, what you say tends to lives forever.

Frequently Post Appealing Pictures to Instagram & Twitter

Images are a powerful form of communication. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest are built solely around the sharing of images; posts that contain images in Twitter and Facebook feeds generate buzz far faster and more efficiently than words alone. Therefore, it pays to ensure that you are posting high-quality, appealing images to all of your social media accounts, and doing so frequently.

What kind of images should you post? New dishes, obviously, but also new ingredients, your prep processes, any special events, etc. If you have the ability to hire a professional photographer, do it. If not, consider creating a work-trade agreement with a photographer interested in trading food for service. Don’t underestimate the power of a good picture to sell out a new dish that very evening. You’d be surprised at the traffic one good photo can generate, as well as how many people will end up checking your Instagram feed to decide what they want to eat, rather than looking at the menu itself.

Don’t Be Helter-Skelter About Your Posts—Put a Social Media Plan in Place

Last, but not least, developing a plan for the management of your restaurant’s social media campaigns is paramount. Work out what you are going to post, who is going to post it and when they are going to do so. Ensure that everyone is on the same page about how to respond to customer comments and represent the brand. Find a nice balance between sharing all the fun things that happen during the day(in and out of the restaurant) without overwhelming everyone. Due to their brief and visual natures, Twitter and Instagram can be powerful sources of traffic and relationship building that restaurateurs should be sure to take advantage of. Remember that upbeat authenticity is the key to a successful social media campaign, no matter which platform you’re using.

Tags: consumer relations, marketing strategies, restaurant management, social media restaurant tips