Knowing when to publish posts online is just as important as knowing what to post. And, when offering insights and updates on your new restaurant, that rule applies to some of the best posts you can share on Facebook. As a platform that favors images over text, with just a few lines available as display text when a new post hits the newsfeed, Facebook is an ideal way of getting your point across quickly and simply.
If you’re looking to launch your new restaurant on Facebook, here are ten of the best post ideas to get more traffic to your site and more orders from your menu.
Hire a photographer
When it comes to sharing information about your restaurant, you will always need attractive, high-resolution images. In order to catch the attention of your potential customers, a big block of text will not do the trick. Remember, you have about two-and-a-half seconds before someone scrolling through their newsfeed will decide to swipe up or click on your post. Whether it’s with photos of your new ingredients, your staff, or the restaurant itself, your posts will always need to be accompanied by photos – and hiring a photographer is the safest way to ensure they are eye-catching, well-lit, and properly composed.
Share your menu
Customers will be coming to you for a plate of food, first and foremost, with any atmosphere and funky furniture merely being plus points. One of the first things you’re going to want to share is your menu, as well as a few descriptions of the dishes on offer. You want your customers to know why they need to visit your restaurant, while being as up-front as possible to ensure they aren’t getting any false impressions. Further down the line, once you start to accrue a loyal customer base, you can also share some sneak peeks at future dishes you believe will bring more diners to your door.
Show off your restaurant, inside and out
Now this is another reason to hire a photographer. Sharing images of your restaurant is a great way to generate customer interest, by showing off your gorgeous restaurant and all the hard work you have put into it. If you have done a complete exterior overhaul, with new window frames, a new door and some fresh paint, make sure people know about it. Ever hear the one about a joke not being funny if told in an empty forest where no-one can hear it? Well, the same logic applies to a fantastic-looking restaurant that nobody will know about unless they happen to drive past it. Show off the goods!
Introduce your staff
It always helps to put a face to a name, so be sure to share some information about who will be at the front door to greet your guests. Introducing your staff – in either a single post sharing a group photo, or with individual posts for each front of house staff member – is a great way to humanize your business, as customers can know which friendly face will be working to provide the very best dining experience. You can also maximize traffic to your page by tagging your staff, as these images will then appear in the newsfeeds of their friends who will, in turn, be interested in checking out the page that had tagged them in the first place.
Demonstrate your chefs in action
Another way to humanize your restaurant is by sharing photos of your chefs doing what they do best: cooking. This a terrific opportunity to post striking, visually arresting photos, for the kitchen of a restaurant will always be a dramatic and energetic environment. Ask your chefs to prepare a particularly complicated-looking dish and then share photos of that preparation atop a caption informing customers that it's one of the signature items on your menu. The apparent difficulty of preparing such a dish will be sure to pique interest, as well as demonstrate the professionalism of your work force to have made such an unusual and impressive plate of food.
Spread the word if your restaurant has generated any positive buzz
Let your customers be your promoters. It always helps to generate your own marketing material, but sometimes the simplest and most effective advertising comes from existent content. Rather than telling potential diners that your clam chowder is the best in the state, just let the customer say that. If your page has received comments from extremely satisfied diners, always share that in your own newsfeed; reward customers for their engagement. People will be much more strongly inclined to test out a dish if they are being told how good it is by previous diners, and they won’t want to miss out on that experience for themselves.
Tell customers about upcoming events or special offers
Restaurants offer plenty of added perks beyond the menu, especially ones with outdoor seating areas. If you have any guest appearances by local musicians – or established acts on tour – utilize all outdoor performance space for them to perform, while using this event as an opportunity to promote special offers to your increased customer volume. Fans of the act you have invited to perform will come to your restaurant to see them play, giving you a fresh vein of clientele, so give them reason to come back with special offers such as cocktail nights or drink-and-meal deals that could put a smile on anyone’s face. Whenever you get a brainwave to increase your profit margins, do yourself a huge favor and promote it long before the fact to generate interest and secure future attendance.
Time your posts strategically
Posting anything online means playing to the economy of attention: the more time people give you, the more successful your posts will be. You will need to strategize your content to achieve its maximum outreach, meaning your posts need to be more than just interesting or funny. The best times to post are usually during the working week, with the timeslot between 1pm and 4pm earning the largest volume of clicks. If you are posting on weekends, try not to post after 2pm on a Saturday, as people will started to go out for whatever activities they’d planned for that day – but you can post on Sunday just about whenever you like, as this day of rest often finds people scrolling through their phones from 10am to 7pm.
Create seasonal content
Keeping up with the weather is an effective way to demonstrate your active social media presence, which in turn reflects well on your restaurant. If customers observe that you are putting dishes on the menu appropriate to the colder climates, as well as posting regularly, you are proving yourself to be an attentive and focused manager. You see what is going on, you are making the necessary changes, and you are informing your customers of this. If you neglect to do so and just keep your menu the same all year round, this can leave a sour taste in customers’ mouths who may grow bored of the same set list of items and look elsewhere for greater culinary diversity.
Tell customers a little about yourself
Once again putting a human face to your business, treat this post idea the same way as you would consider greeting customers at their table if they were to dine at your restaurant in real life. There is a great deal of positive rapport to be established between you and your diners when the latter has a clear understanding of the former's personality. If you can’t yet prove yourself to be a chatty, welcoming, and knowledgeable manager, think of ways to convey that in a Facebook post. Share photos that demonstrate your previous managerial experience, or write a post explaining who you are and why you care so much about food. Expertise and passion are extremely appealing traits to new customers, who will want to know they’re in safe hands.
Opening your own restaurant is as challenging as it is satisfying, with so many logistical hurdles to overcome even before you get your first plate of food on the customer’s table. Above buying the building, furnishing it, selecting your tableware and mood lighting, the food always comes first.
If you don’t yet have a supplier, then why not check out the enormous range of fresh, organic produce available at Buffalo Market? With an inventory exceeding 2,600 items, you will be spoiled for choice when it comes to crisp vegetables, flavorsome spices, and just about any kind of oil you could need. Better yet, take a look at some of our recipes for more ideas on what to put on your menu - or dive deeper into maximizing business potential on Facebook with another run-through of how to market your restaurant on the world's most popular social media platform.
Support
Sales