Your Guide to Social Media Marketing for Restaurants (Plus, a Tool You Need)

Struggling with social media marketing for your restaurant? We made it easy by breaking down everything you need to know, plus giving you our top tool to get started.

Posted last month

Written by

Mackenzie Taylor

Posted last month

While your restaurant might be the best thing in the world, if you’re not promoting your restaurant through social media marketing, you could be losing out on valuable customers. And we hate to say it—if you’re not on social media, you’re doing yourself no favors (unless your business model is not having any customers!).

Putting together a good social media strategy, figuring out your audience, and understanding the tools you need to be successful on social are all key things to getting started and that’s what we’re here for! Learn everything you need to know about social media marketing for your restaurant.

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Why is social media marketing so important for restaurants?
What social media platforms should you be on to promote your restaurant?
What makes for a good restaurant social media post?
How restaurants can use social media marketing
How Flick Can Help Restaurants with Social Media Marketing

Why is social media marketing so important for restaurants?

Social media is the way most businesses talk to their customers now. It’s an easy and effective way for you to give updates, announce new menu items and restaurant locations, and more.

Using social media marketing for your restaurant can help with:

Reach

With so many people on social media, you’re bound to get new people to see your content the more consistently you post. Yes, TV ads and billboards are a way to market your business, but it’s not going to have the impact that being on social media will have for your niche and local audience (plus, it’s WAY more expensive in the long run!). If you plan it correctly, a single post you create can reach thousands and thousands of potential customers to help raise your brand awareness and increase your reach overall.

Cost-effective

As we mentioned above, doing billboards and TV ads can be expensive. When you create a social media post (and even if you decide to create a social media ad), it has the potential to reach thousands of people you might not have reached before! Having a social media account is free—and yes, while costs can add up once you start hiring a social media manager, run ads, and more, the upfront cost of running a social media account is free!

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A post shared by Salt and Smoke (@saltandsmokebbq)

Attract more customers

There are millions upon millions of people on social media, chances are … your audience is there! I mean, unless you’re super niche but chances are, your super niche audience is online as well! If you’re not being active on social media, you’re missing out on a massive amount of people who could know about you and the delicious food at your restaurant.

Visual appeal

The perfect photo of food can draw a lot of people into wanting to head to your restaurant too. When you use social media to post those photos of your enticing food, the likelihood of people stopping and going, “Dang, I should try that” is very high meaning more foot traffic to your storefront. Showcasing these visuals on restaurant digital signage inside your venue can also tempt customers to order more, promoting daily specials or new dishes with high-quality visuals.

What social media platforms should you be on to promote your restaurant?

Choosing which social media platform to be on can be tricky. Especially when you may have limited time and resources to put together a great social media plan.

Each platform definitely has its own unique audience, which means you need to do some research into who your exact audience is that you want to market towards.

Instagram Analytics

Grow your account with best-in-class Instagram Analytics.

You can also experiment on each platform to see where you are getting better results. Perhaps you will find more success on Facebook with an older audience where you can get reviews, show off photos and videos, create ads, and share updates on your restaurants.

Or maybe you’ll find your audience on Instagram where photos and videos are the king and the demographic skews to almost all age groups, but in particular millennials.

We would also recommend trying TikTok and seeing if you can create funny, engaging, educational, or entertaining videos about your restaurant’s food, people, and culture.

Before signing up for every platform under the sun, ask yourself these questions first:

What type of restaurant do you have?
Is your audience older or younger?
Where do your audience live and how would you normally promote to them?
What is the brand voice of your restaurant? Are you funny? Serious? Think about this before starting your social channels.

Once you’ve figured out those questions, you’ll be able to start figuring out what social media platforms you should probably be on.

Facebook

The biggest platform (yes, still!) in the game. Facebook is the original social media platform and is one of the best ones for you to be on as you can get reviews, share your address, keep your audience informed of new items or events that might be happenings at your restaurant, and more. One of the best reasons to be on Facebook is the number of tools it has for businesses: Facebook ads, Facebook shopping, direct booking, and more.

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A post shared by Mexican Seoul (@mexican.seoul)

Instagram

Being a visual medium, Instagram is a great way for you to share your food content all over! People love being enticed by delicious food and being on Instagram is one of the best ways to do that. Back in the day, it was quite popular (and honestly is still popular!) to post food under #foodstagram and show off what you were eating.

Similar to Facebook (as it’s owned by the same company), Instagram has a number of tools that help businesses grow and reach new audiences like a digital storefront, direct bookings, sharing important information through an Instagram feed or Story, and more.

@mcdonaldswoww lots of peoplee r tryingg the grimace shake♬ original sound – McDonald’s

TikTok

TikTok has taken over the world with its short-form video content. It’s a fun platform but can feel majorly overwhelming if you haven’t been on it before. There are multiple ways for you as a restaurant to promote yourself on TikTok, and the app even has some great ways for businesses to promote themselves through ads and shops, similar to Facebook and Instagram. When writing for TikTok, remember its demographic tends to skew younger, so be sure to plan your content accordingly.

What makes for a good restaurant social media post?

Honestly, there are a number of different factors to how to make a great social media marketing post for a restaurant—good image or video, good caption, specific hashtags, etc. If your content isn’t good, there’s no reason someone is going to engage with it. What are the key factors for making sure you have a good post? It’s making sure you have these things:

Good image or video
Good caption (click here if you need help writing captions!)
Hashtags that make sense for your content
A call-to-action

One of the most important things when it comes to your content is to make sure you know what you want your customers to do after they see your content. Do you want them to click the link in your bio? Share your info with their friends? Order food online? Whatever this is, your call to action should be clear and concise and always included in each of your posts.

How restaurants can use social media marketing

A lot of restaurants use social media marketing to connect and engage with new and old guests in delicious, fun, creative, and engaging ways. Menu templates allow restaurant owners to design visually appealing menus efficiently, which can be shared on social media to boost engagement and attract more customers. But what are some of those ways, you’re asking?

Posting updated menus or new menu items
Sharing customers or guests that are regulars
Sharing recipes that guests can make
Behind-the-scenes shots and videos
Highlight staff members
Post photos or videos of your food
Changes in hours
New locations

How Flick Can Help Restaurants with Social Media Marketing

Flick’s AI Social Media Marketing Assistant is an AI tool to help with content and caption ideas for your social media.

With the tool, you can enter your Brand Information by providing your website or Instagram handle. The tool will put together a bio about your company, details about your audience, and what language and tone of voice you write in. By adjusting the information so it’s exactly what you’d like, the content and captions will be completely made for you.

To get content and caption ideas, enter a topic or a keyword and the AI Assistant will provide you with endless topic ideas.

You’ll even get caption ideas that are on-brand and engaging for every single social media channel you’re on. No more overthinking your captions. No more creative block. Just never-ending ideas at your fingertips.

Instagram scheduler

Start scheduling with Flick!

Plus, with Flick, you’ll have access to its Scheduling tool where all your caption and content ideas can be scheduled out with a single click. By using Flick’s Scheduler, you’ll be able to upload and schedule out content for your Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn all from ONE platform.

Not only that (yes, there is a lot more!), you will get access to:

Flick’s analytics page is where you can get in-depth analytics on your Instagram account to see what’s working for you and even compare your content to your competitors.
Flick’s hashtags tool is where you can get hashtags that work perfectly for your content each and every time. No more doing your own research, but with a simple click of a button, you’ll get immediate hashtags that work for your caption and account each and every time.

Start a free 7-day trial to get started and grow your social media accounts. You can also get immediate access to our FREE AI Caption Generator right here.

Content

Why is social media marketing so important for restaurants?

What social media platforms should you be on to promote your restaurant?

What makes for a good restaurant social media post?

How restaurants can use social media marketing

How Flick Can Help Restaurants with Social Media Marketing

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