Facebook Marketing For Restaurants

By Author: Luke Wright
Total Articles: 3
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Facebook has become a favourite destination for people, businesses and organizations to connect and share information because of its easy-to-use interface and interactive features. This can be a great tool for restaurants to promote their service to a huge crowd. As a Social Media Agency, we suggest a few essentials you should pay attention to in order to stand out from the crowd before you being measuring the social media marketing success of your brand:

Custom Landing Page: Before liking your page, generally a visitor would want to learn more about you and your brand. They are most likely not going to find the relevant information they need without liking the page. Provide the visitors an informative & intriguing landing page is part of any strategy when maximizing Social Media Optimization.

Updates: Updates are your weapon to create an engagement. You can share trivia about Food, Diet Tips, Secret Recipes, Recent Menu Additions, Weekly Menu Attractions, etc to draw comments including suggestions and opinions from your Facebook Fans. The engagement with your fans will drive your business into a more consumer ...
... centric approach eventually making your brand more ‘likeable’ to guests.  Negative Criticism must be dealt with immediately and appropriately. A common mistake made by Social Media Marketers is to ignore Positive Criticism whereas it has equal potential to enhance the image of your brand similar to a client’s testimonial on your website.

Contests & Competitions: One of the best ways to drive engagement and build word of mouth marketing about your restaurant is to run a contest on Facebook. Fans competing amogst each other can generate a lot of noise on Facebook News Feeds. Try to offer something that would appeal a contestant like ‘A Complimentary Dinner for Two’ or ‘A gift voucher for the winning couple’, etc. Validation of the contest winner via Facebook will further elevate the genuineness of your brand’s promise and will score more participants for future contests.
Essentially, the contest itself should fun and easy to participate in. Some Facebook Apps for Contest Management are: Wildfire, Votigo, Bulbstorm, etc.

Photos and Videos: ‘An image says a thousand words’- Maybe more in case of a video! Photos and Videos of your restaurant and people who visit your restaurant can be uploaded on regular basis to inform as well as to initiate interactions and discussions. Tagging these pictures of regular guests and visitors will promote your restaurant to the friends of your guests. Such exponential publicity is bound to get you more traffic, fans and even guests to your restaurant. Multimedia content generally grabs more attention than simple texts.

Engagement: Engagement is the essence of any Social Media activity. Unless you are engaging with your fans regularly, you are not using Social Media Marketing efficiently. Active participation & responsiveness is the key. Facebook Walls should be used appropriately to update and interact with fellow fans using valuable content, and at the same time, interact with your fans around any update they post.

Facebook Applications: In order to stand out from the crowd, you really need to use Facebook Apps. Facebook Applications can help you engage, analyse & segment your fans. While there are several apps available, which can be of great use in your restaurant's page, the following three are worth a mention:
Food Scrabble -a scrabble game with food names.
Food Fight – a gaming app meant for multi-player engagement.
Food Quotient – suggest ideal dishes to fans, depending on their likes, preference etc.
What matters most is posting interesting content and participating timely. If your fans like your page, they want ‘likeable’ updates also. Be sure to feed them with content which can bring a smile to their face. There's nothing to be serious about. Get involved with your fans freely and entertain them. Done properly, your Facebook fan page can be an asset to boost your brand image online.

Jaikant Shardul is a Digital marketing professional who has worked with over 50 brands across the globe and is now employed with a Social Media Agency – Vizz Media. He writes interesting articles on various various Social Media Networking Services and how they affect various industries.