How restaurants can leverage the power of social media to drive brand success

16th March 2020

Social media management is a crucial experience that is growing in importance within the hospitality sector. As a cost-conscious way of driving growth and building a customer base, social media has the power to drive local clientele to your premises. By using social media channels to help engage with your customers, you can help improve your wider engagement.

Read 3POS’s Latest Guide to Social Media Success for the Hospitality Sector:

“To help improve your restaurant’s presence on social media, here are some important tips you should always keep in mind.

Quality content

This is arguably the most critical factor when you want to create a buzz around your social media pages. The constant flow of information must be accompanied by quality content that ensures users can like, share, comment on, or retweet them. Insightful and valuable content is one of the most effective ways of driving your social media management. Some companies in the hospitality industry also add creativity through humour.

Strategic approach

After selecting the most appropriate platforms, your business should set goals such as driving sales or improving customer service. However, the process cannot be complete without a clear strategy and plan of achieving the goals. The strategy should lay out your restaurant’s posting frequency, target audience, and topics of interest. You should also analyse the available content as well as the ones that still need to be created.

Educate, engage, and appreciate your audience

Social media is all about interacting and connecting with customers rather than talking about yourself. It is essential to spark conversations that aim to educate, engage, or appreciate customers. Fostering a healthy relationship and trust with your customers requires engaging them through comments, chats, addressing complaints, answering questions and acknowledging feedback.

Prompt response

Both current and prospective customers value a quick response on social media. Prompt replies will give them a good impression of your restaurant and the ability to handle their hospitality needs effectively. Apart from showing that your business cares about their needs, it may also result in quicker and more sales.

Promotion of social media pages

Despite being used for marketing your business, social media accounts should also be promoted. Customers should be made aware of the existence of these pages to increase the number of followers. Encourage them to interact with the business on various social media platforms through your blogs and e-mails.”

If you run a hospitality business and would like to get started with social media why not check out these useful getting started guides? A great ‘starter’ social media platform would be Instagram – read this useful guide to help get started on Instagram.