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5 Powerful Social Media Tips for Restaurants

Social media is an amazing tool for restaurants. Your patronage and direct takeout orders can grow with your following - if you do it right. Here are our 5 best tips social media tips for restaurants to help you achieve just that:

Truffle POS Social Media Tips for Restaurants

Social Media Tip 1: Update your social media regularly (or delete it!)

A bustling social media page with regular updates, reviews, and engagement is like having customers seated in your restaurant. It flags to passersby that your restaurant is busy, popular, and absolutely worth checking out.

 An abandoned social media page leaves your customers with more questions than answers. If you don’t regularly post, your customers might wonder whether your restaurant is closed. Then, they’ll probably move onto another restaurant instead. 

At this point, it might be worth deleting your social media accounts. You don’t want your online presence to turn off or turn away potential customers. 

By the way – a regular posting schedule means updating your social media once every two weeks at least! 3-4 posts per week will get you better results if you’re looking to attract new customers. 

4 customers taking photos of their restaurant meal for social media

Social Media Tip 2: Share special offers with your followers

This is one of the best social media tips for restaurants! Social media offers an easy way for you to connect with your customers. It’s an opportunity for you to get people into the store when it’s quiet, attract more direct orders, and find new customers.  You can use your social media platforms to share ‘social media only’ specials. You can use these to sell more of certain dishes. This is useful if you’ve got an oversupply of one ingredient, or some stock that’s about to go out of date. Or, you can use it to ramp up patronage during quiet periods. Facebook has a separate template for restaurants and cafes. It has a separate tab for special offers. Keep that updated to keep your customers coming back for more!
Use social media to advertise exclusive specials for direct orders

Social Media Tip 3: Master 'Insta-worthy' food presentation

Well-presented food makes for great social media posts. It means you’ll always have content on hand for your social media feed. And you’ll get for free advertising from your visitors.

That’s right. You can encourage your visitors to share their ‘food porn’ on Instagram and other social media platforms just by making it pretty. ‘Insta-worthy’ food and table settings get more free advertising from visitors.  

You could always nudge them along with a discount or an entry to a draw to win a prize (like a free meal). 

Social Media Tip 4: Share staff stories and experiences

Your followers love hearing stories unique to your restaurant! Tell those stories to reap the benefits of engagement from your followers.

Increased engagement boosts brand awareness, gets your restaurant in front of new faces, and is extremely cost effective. This is because when your followers like or comment on your post, that post is deemed ‘interesting’ by the social media bots. The bots then show that post to more people, since their job is to show the best content to people using social media so they stay there for longer.  

Here are some ideas for posts that should attract high engagement: 

– Have your kitchen team tell the stories behind the dishes you create.

– Share a recipe.

– Explain why a particular dish is so meaningful to you. 

– Put a social media spotlight on your employee of the month.  

 

Restaurant manager and chef in beautifully presented kitchen

Social Media Tip 5: Boost posts intelligently

You can spend a lot of money boosting posts without really getting results. If you want the best bang for your buck, target the people who are most likely to visit your restaurant. 

Use the advanced settings to target people who are ‘interested’ in food, restaurants, OR whichever type of cuisine you offer. Then, set the area to your local area to limit the number of ads being sent out to only the people who would visit your restaurant.

You will need to experiment with the settings that work best for you. When doing so, start with small amounts of money to see what gets results. Then, you can funnel more money into the advertising that gets results! You can read more about paid Facebook ads in this Wordstream article.

Grow your restaurant with Truffle POS

Truffle POS is the all-in-one POS system your growing restaurant needs. The features we offer drive revenues, minimize expenses, and ensure your kitchen runs smoothly and efficiently. And you’ll always have the inventory you need on hand. 

The future of restaurants is automated. Secure your future today!

Book a free 30-minute demo to unlock growth.

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