YES! But only if you're committed. Social media, such as Facebook and Instagram are great ways to engage with your audience and to start a two-way conversation with your customers. But the worst thing you can do is have a stale page and/or not respond when someone tries to engage you in conversation.
I'm Committed! Now What?
Social media needs to have a strategy.
Engaging in Facebook or Instagram should never, ever be random. It should have a strategy, a purpose and execute your mission and purpose.
The three tips for getting your restaurant rolling on social media:
Define your social media goals and objectives. What do you want to accomplish out of your Facebook or Instagram page? Have lots of followers? Get more business into your restaurant? Improve your reputation? Get more reviews? Have your customers tag you in their posts? Depending on what you want to get OUT of social media, will determine what you are going to put IN to social media. All of your social media posts should be executing on one of these goals.
Increase your reach. Organic or Paid? The way both Facebook and Instagram's algorithms work, organic posts will only show up in the feed off about 20% of your followers. In order to reach a wider audience, it is likely you will need to participate in some paid advertising. At this point, "paid social" is still fairly inexpensive. If you decide to participate in paid social, you will want to determine your budget and define your audience, so your paid post will be as targeted to your preferred audience as possible. These are the people who are more likely to take action on your post (and hopefully come in for a meal!)
Was that even successful? The next most important step of engaging in social media is determining your metrics and measuring your success with analytics. Some common metrics are: - Impressions - the number of people who saw your post - Engagements - the number of times someone interacted with your posts (likes, shares, clicks, replies, comments) - Engagement rate - the number of engagements / number of impressions - Visits - the number of times someone clicked through to your website - Mentions - the number of people who @mention you in their posts - Followers - the number of people who are following your page/handle
Strategy ... check!
I know how tempting it is to just create your Facebook page, and start posting but please do not do that. Think through your strategy, what and how you want to accomplish your goals, then determine who will be responsible for executing the tactics. Without a strategy, your posts will be random and weird and your customer will feel it. And you really don't want your customers to think you're random and weird.
To get started, download our SOCIAL STRATEGY worksheet or give us a call and we'll help walk you through it.
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