Do you work for, manage or own an eating establishment? Do you want to know how to use social media to market your restaurant? It’s a common problem - restaurants want to be engaging with their clientele; they want to use social tools to get more patrons walking through their doors - but they just don’t know how. Adding social media to your marketing mix can hugely increase awareness about your restaurant, generate motivated engagement with your food, and get you more customers in your door. In this presentation, I'll show you 21 actionable tactics and tips for using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to market to your customers.

1. 21 Tips: Social
Media Marketing
for Restaurants

3. Table of Contents
Facebook Marketing1
2 Instagram Marketing
Twitter Marketing3
Other Social Sites4

4. Facebook Marketing1

5. Facebook Marketing for Restaurants
Facebook provides an incredible
opportunity for establishments to
connect with their clientele.
Your patrons are here - and most
of them are checking their updates
a few times a day.
Facebook is a place where people
go to ‘hangout’ with friends. That’s
why they go out to eat too, right?

6. 7 Facebook Tips:
1
2
Facebook Tabs:Use tabs on your Facebook Page to entice people to
visit your eatery. The first four tabs in particular are key - these are
the tabs that show up on your front page (without clicking to open
them all).
Cover image: You have 851x351 pixels to market your business, for free.
Include delicious photos of your food, or people having a good time while
eating with friends. You could change your cover image whenever you have a
menu change, and market the new items or specials.

7. 7 Facebook Tips:
3
Exclusive Offers and Deals:Post exclusive offers on your Facebook Page.
Give deals to patrons if they “like” your Page. Give group deals (using a
third party app, as per Facebook rules), to entice your Fans to share your
deal with their friends - and get those friends to become Fans of your
Page too. A group deal can lead to immediate foot traffic into your
establishment too!
4
Photos of Food: The most shared posts on
Facebook are images. You’re in the
business of food, and food is a very visual
thing. Be sure to include lots of images of
your food in your regular Facebook
updates. You could even create a
lookbook of your current menu items.

8. 7 Facebook Tips
5
Contests and Sweepstakes:Use social sweepstakes and contests on
your Facebook Page. These social promotions add excitement, and
a great reason to get your customers coming back to both your
Facebook Page, and your restaurant.
Here’s an example from a
client using our sweepstakes
app. Wayne Gretzky’s Toronto
ran a geo-targeted sweepstakes
through Facebook to
successfully generate
awareness of their newly
renovated digs, and their brand
new menu.

9. 7 Facebook Tips
6
Geo-target Ads: Facebook ads lets you do all kinds of very specific,
niche targeting. For restaurants and diners, this is ideal. You can target
your ads to be seen only by Facebookers in your particular geographic
location. You can also target your ads to be seen by those with specific
likes, and by those who like certain pages.
Embed Videos: Videos are very cool when embedded directly into an
update, or in a tab. If you have videos about how your food is made, or
you have an interview with your chef/ food suppliers/ happy customers
- include them in an update.
7

10. Instagram Marketing2

11. Instagram Marketing
Instagram is a hugely popular photo sharing site.
With its seamless integration with Facebook, it’s
used about 95% of the time when your patrons are
posting images to their Facebook friends.
You can use Instagram in conjunction with your
Facebook tactics, or you can use the site on its
own.
Here are seven tips for using Instagram marketing,
on its own.

12. 7 Instagram Tips
1
Trending Hashtags: To increase awareness about both
your Instagram profile, and your restaurant, include
relevant trending hashtags. For example, if it happens to
be #nationalcheesecakeday , and your culinary delights
include cheesecake, post a scrumptious photo of it.
2
Niche Hashtag: Get found more easily by your niche
market by using specific hashtags. For example, if you’re
a bakery in New York, use geographic specific tags, like
#sohoeats. Instagram is a mobile social site. Including a
specific location in your tags can get found by foot traffic
looking to eat, just outside your door.
3 Campaign Specific Hashtags: When you’re running a particular
marketing campaign (such as a contest or group offer), create a tag
just for that promotion. This lets your followers - and anyone else -
engage with your campaign by using your hashtag in their posts, too.

13. 7 Instagram Tips
4
Photos of Menu: Instagram is a site of photos. Use this opportunity to
post delicious photos of your menu items.
5
Engage with menu items: Take photos of you
menu one step further - get your customers to
upload their favourite items, to help build your
menu of images on the site.
This type of user generated content not only gets
your customers involved with you socially, it
creates a stronger bond and customer loyalty.

14. 7 Instagram Tips
6
Employee appreciation: Take a photo of
your staff working with your product or
menu items. It could be a chef, a waitress,
or even a busboy. Post them to your
company Instagram feed, with a short
description.
Use these types of photos to show that
you’re an establishment that values the
people that work for you.
At the same time, you’ll likely create a
cool working environment for your staff!
It also shows that you’re a fun place, and
likely with great customer service.

15. 7 Instagram Tips
Photo Contests: If you want to gain a lot
of user generated content (UGC), set up
a photo contest - on Instagram. A photo
contest can motivate your customers to
engage with you, your menu items, and
your restaurant. They can generate a lot
of customer loyalty, as someone who
takes a photo and submits it in your
contest will care if they win or not. They
will likely think about that photo and your
menu item and your place for a least a
little bit of time.
7
Here’s an example of how a local
gourmet cafe used a photo contest
and a $15 gift card to get UGC from
their dedicated customers:

16. Twitter Marketing3

17. Twitter Marketing
Twitter is a very successful marketing
tool for restaurants, both large and small
and from high end to fast food (including
street trucks).
With only 140 characters per update,
tweets get read, and shared at a
phenomenal, immediate rate. Twitter is
also used a lot through mobile.
How can you best promote your culinary
delights on this site?
Here are seven tips for your restaurant
Twitter marketing.

18. 7 Twitter Tips:
1
2
Hashtags: Hashtags are very popular on Twitter too. Include them in
your updates. Use similar tactics to the ones mentioned above with
Intstagram.
Tip: You don’t want too many tags (given the character constraints on
this platform - you want to leave room in your tweets to get RT’s and
shares with @mentions - so a friend can send your tweet to a friend).
Include a link to your menu: Include links in your tweets. This gives your
followers further action to take, and lets them interact with your more. Include a
link to your menus, so your Followers can make an easy choice of dining with
you. Tip: This is especially great if you deliver!

19. 7 Twitter Tips:
3
4
Group offers: Promoting your establishment through coupons and
discounts has long been a part of successful marketing.
Add in a social element, and make it a group deal - and you could have
a viral campaign on your hands. You could, for example, run a group
offer for a free appetizer. This will encourage your patrons to share your
group offer tweet to their friends - and it will drive people into your
eatery.
Include images of your food:
Although Twitter is a text based site,
updates with photos in them get
shared, can get you more followers on
Twitter , and can drive traffic into your
establishment.
Here’s an example of a scrumptious
and delicious looking image from
La Dolce Vita:

20. 7 Twitter Tips:
5
6
Use Promoted tweet: Choose your best tweets, and pay to promote
them to a targeted audience. This is particularly effective for your timed
updates being sent out around meal times. Check out how Merridees
cleverly uses this tactic to promote their daily lunch specials.
Time your tweets: Send out tweets close to breakfast, lunch and
dinner times. Unlike Facebook, your tweets will show up in Followers’
feeds immediately as you send them. Invite your followers to join you
for your special deal for Twitter followers. And use hashtags for the
meal times, like #lunch or #dinner. It makes it even easier to find you
on a Twitter search. Remember: think like your customer!

21. 7 Twitter Tips:
7
Geo-target your ads: The only problem with the Merridees tweet,
above, is that they are located in Tennessee, and I am not. It is
incredibly important to geo-target your ads on Twitter. If your place of
dining is located in Seattle - make sure you check off the geo-targeting
location of Seattle when you are paying for your promoted tweets.
Getting your message to the right patrons in the right location is
particularly true for your mobile users. You might just reach your
customers as they are walking by your door!

22. Other Social Sites4

23. 5 Other Social Sites for Restaurants:
1 Pinterest
2 Blog
3 YouTube
4 Yelp
5 FourSquare

24. More Social Media Marketing Tips:
1 Facebook:
8 Sure-Fire Facebook Post Formulas That Drive Engagement
The 5 Most Common Facebook Post Mistakes
5 Sure-Fire Facebook Contest Idea Formulas
2
Instagram:
5 Best Types of Instagram Photos to Drive Engagement
[INFOGRAPHIC] How Much Engagement Are Top Brands Getting on
Instagram?
Complete Guide to Instagram Marketing for Bars & Nightclubs
3
Twitter:
52 Methods: How to Get Your Tweets Retweeted
The 9 Most Common Mistakes on Twitter
[Infographic] The Top 7 Tips to Get More Followers on Twitter
Tweeting Content about your Company (and how not to)

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