5 Tips on How to Do Social Media Marketing for Restaurants

Everyone uses social media to gauge the quality of the restaurant they are heading out to when scheduling dates, meeting family in town, or enjoying brunch with friends. There have been a few avenues of sleuthing over the years to ensure the best bite is about to be had (see: Yelp and Foursquare), but in recent years, social media has quickly become the go-to medium for many diners to figure out what restaurants to visit.

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                                                                        Photo courtesy of Prateek Katyal

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This looks different depending which site or app you’re on, but the goal is always the same: social media marketing for restaurants engages those who are curious about restaurant food and service quality, and also enables food establishments to reach out and nurture future diners before they make plans for their next night out.

                                                                      Photo courtesy of Eaters Collective

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Restaurants are wisening up to how to do this well: with tantalizing images of newly crafted dishes, promoting events and specials across locations, and encouraging visitors to like, share and tag a pic when they’ve visited. Most importantly, restaurants can respond and engage with diners directly and swiftly, differentiating themselves from their competitors and driving business with the tap of a screen.

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                                                                       Photo courtesy of Collins Lesulie

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Synup works with thousands of businesses, many of them restaurants, in optimizing their social media marketing. With our industry experience and digital marketing expertise, we’ve crafted a few tips to get any restaurant off the ground and onto the social media apps.

                                                                              Photo courtesy of Alex Haney

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Tip #1: Figure out who it is you are marketing to

The easiest place to start is figuring out the typical crowd at your restaurant. Brunching Moms on a Sunday? Tourists with extra cash and the intention to splurge on the best burger in town? Or high end clientele for your 12-seat-only Michelin star restaurant in the heart of Soho? Whoever it is, nail the audience and work your way backwards from there. Knowing your audience helps with establishing where you should focus your marketing efforts.

                                                                            Photo courtesy of Josh Rose

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Tip #2: Figure out which social media apps you want to focus on

Different apps offer different angles at which you can market, capabilities on how you market and opportunities for analysis on your marketing campaigns. Different demographics prefer different social media channels, as well. For instance, while Facebook is popular with users of all ages, Instagram is more popular with younger people. Pick the social media channels where your target market is most active.

                                                                                Photo courtesy of Ali Inay

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Tip #3: Define your social media tone and visual branding style

This should obviously align with your restaurant’s overall branding, but think about the tone of your messaging. Tone can be conveyed not just in how you’re writing your captions, but also in the color and imagery you use when creating content. Food pics and videos are very popular on social media platforms, so creating visual content that is appealing will entice customers to like, share with others, and visit your location. Diversify how you share items on your menu, as well, to prevent your grid or feed from becoming too homogenous.

                                                                        Photo courtesy of Nguyễn Lê Hoài Châu

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Tip #4: Videos are the future

Most social media marketing experts will tell you this: videos are essential if you want the algorithms to favor your content. Videos sound like a daunting task, but if a 12 year old can do it on TikTok, trust me, you can, too. We recommend deciding on a series of videos to do for continuity and branding.

Some restaurants choose videos highlighting their specialty dishes, their ability to produce high quality events, or how-to’s and recipe videos. Think about creating videos that are going to highlight unique experiences at your restaurant.

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Here are some examples of restaurants that kill it with videos on Instagram:

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Razza, Jersey City, NJ‍

Razza features artisanal pizza as its main fare, but they offer more than that to appeal to their diners. On their Instagram, you can see videos of pizza preparation, how they harvest their ingredients, new wines and event prep. They even feature other goods to be purchased and taken home: cultured butter, sourdough bread and much more. Many pizza joints try to let the pizza speak for itself, but Razza has managed to do that and much more using videos.

Martin’s BBQ Joint, Nashville, TN, Birmingham, AL, Charleston, SC, and Louisville, KY

If you know anything, you know when you go to the South you’re going to find good BBQ. Standing out among the crowd of other legitimately delicious BBQ joints is Martin’s BBQ, which features a mix of pictures and videos highlighting their hog smoking techniques and food preparation.

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Donaji, San Francisco, CA

Donaji serves fresh Oaxacan Mexican food and features a ton of personality on their social media profile in both long and short videos. Their behind-the-scenes style of filming welcomes the user, displaying how their food is plated and should be eaten. They even share the small long-time businesses in Oaxaca that supply their tlayudas!

                                                                    Photo courtesy of Thought Catalog

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Tip #5: Engage with your customers and followers

Many businesses use Instagram Stories to promote interaction with their followers (think: an Italian restaurant doing a Story poll on whether it’s red meat sauce or gravy). Many businesses use stories for gauging customer interest, developing a rapport and unique brand voice, and behind the scenes looks at day-to-day life running a restaurant.

Social media is a real-time opportunity to respond to customer complaints, link to scheduling and managing reservations, and increasing reach for when people are looking to make plans out on the town. We’ve entered a time in which it isn’t enough to just have a storefront, you need to appeal to your audience’s desire to see and be seen at your restaurant.

                                                                         Photo courtesy of Austin Distel

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Tip #6: Make your life easier by using a social media tool to post to all of your social channels

We can guess you don’t have time to do it all: run a restaurant, plan compelling social media content, shoot videos and pictures, coordinate a calendar and post daily. So don’t make your life harder! There are many tools out there for business owners to plan and execute their social media content with ease. Synup Social is one of them and we’ve recently launched ways for restaurants to streamline their social media execution. Synup is unique in that all of your digital marketing efforts for all of your business locations can live in the same place. So get started with Synup Social to find out just how easy it can be.

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Ready to get your restaurant up and running on social media? Synup is offering a free trial today to help your company reach more customers by uniting your social profiles on one platform. Start a conversation with us to find out how we’re making this process stress-free with maximized results.

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