By Sarah Feldman
So far, Facebook is still the best social network to perform marketing actions for restaurants. It is the social network with all the elements to generate engagement; a term that refers to the emotional bond necessary to impact the purchase decisions and finally increase the sales volume of the businesses. Being such an effective tool, the ideal is to get the most out of it with strategies adapted to the different needs of promotion.
Have your most relevant information on FB page
In your Facebook ‘About’, you should always put the slogan or values of your restaurant, but this will not be as useful as placing the service and contact information of your business there. In that space, you must make sure you have the following:
- Kind of food
- Opening Hours
- Address (if it is a single local), if they are 2-6 you can put the sectors or area where the premises are located
- Contact phone / orders
- Website (if you have one)
This information is of utmost importance, and is translated directly into opportunities for new orders. At the level of experience, if you notice, many times we are hungry and we want to visit or ask for a site that we know the name. Having the information of the address, time or phone, increases the chances that we visit your restaurant.
Other points that you can contemplate, are, first, upload your menu on Facebook. This should be in complement, not in substitution, to have your menu on the local page of menus or restaurants. Also, if you offer delivery, you can also upload your info or coverage map of the delivery area.
Give more importance to the visual design of your page
There are some things to keep in mind:
Cover photo:
This photo should sell your business, perhaps showing your establishment or the foods and drinks that represent you the most. It is said that users pay more attention to the cover photo than any other content.
Profile Image:
This is the image that will accompany the comments and publications of the business, therefore, the profile image is the best place for your company’s logo.
Give importance to the images: if you manage a hotel, restaurant or bar, take attractive photos of your city, establishment and the products that are offered there. Those images will then serve as a valuable content to share.
Pay attention to mentions and Check-Ins
The customers of your restaurant will often check-in on your Facebook page, because they like their friends to know where they are. A good strategy, in this case, is to detect those check-ins and to thank the people who make them. The more check-ins are done on your page, the more popular and visible your local restaurant on Facebook will be. You can offer some incentive to increase those check-ins. There are restaurants that reward customers who are tagged or check-in at your place with a drink or dessert for free!
Encourage interaction
Even if it’s just a page that represents your business, always try to be as human as possible. Be sure to respond to the comments of your customers or fans and encourage conversations by asking them open questions. If a client has left a good comment, thanking them can be an incentive that encourages their interaction. In the same way, accept and respond to criticism, apologizing (if applicable) and offering solutions, will show that your business is concerned about your customers and their welfare.
Conduct contests and promotions
Some contests are a very effective way to attract and retain followers. Not only can they increase the number of fans on your page, but they boost traffic to your website and significantly boost your brand recognition. Everyone loves to win, be it a simple drink or a free meal. The contests do not have to be complicated nor the ostentatious prizes, you just have to look for them to be attractive and minimally relevant.
Produce quality content
The most important of the page of your restaurant on Facebook is not the design of it, but the quality of the content posted. What attracts new visitors to this page is their ability to create always new, good quality, creative content that draws the attention of their audience. To create quality content, you first need to know the profile of your page visitors, know what they want to read, what they want to know about your restaurant, so you can focus more on creating your own content style and get even more followers.
Produce video content
Posting videos is of utmost importance to generate engagement and new forms of interaction. This happens because, the video has a good potential of getting viral, much larger than the photo and the text. The video may come out of your page and spread to social networks, bringing the name of your restaurant and your brand to potential customers, and other places you did not have access to.
Another good point of the video is that Facebook itself helps to spread it by putting an autoplay button, so when a person is on your page and goes through some video of you, it automatically starts to play without the person needing click any button, this means that even if he/she did not have an interest in watching the video, they end up watching it.
Make the customer interest in your restaurant
The main purpose of your Facebook page is not to make your fans buy something, after all, your business is not E-Commerce. What you need to do is generate interest so that anyone who flips your page will also know your restaurant. If you can get 10% of your new followers to go to the restaurant, you will already have an extremely expressive result and your profit will increase considerably.
For this, your page should be full of interesting information having the potential to attract the interesting visitor. Make contents with several tips, create interesting images, attract the attention of your visitor, not for the price offered, but for the quality of your restaurant and the content posted.
Conclusion
As you can see, these are simple actions to implement, but they make a difference when it comes to attracting more traffic to your restaurant and offering a better experience.
