How Restaurants Can Improve Social Media Presence by Interacting with Consumers

Social media isn’t a strategy that immediately starts paying off, but the long-term results make it worth your while.

As a restaurant or café, besides showing off your delicious dishes, you can use social media to spice up interactions with visitors and followers.

High engagement is the ultimate goal of social media. Likes, shares, retweets and comments all prove you captured the attention of your audience — and studies show that engagement impacts conversions.

Polls and Contests for High Engagement

Interactive content is the one type of content that was enabled by social media platforms. You can drive high engagement by using quizzes or polls, which result in repeat visitors and several exposures.

For example, you could:

• Post a Twitter poll and ask people to vote for which meal you should introduce next into your menu.
• Run a competition where people create their own meal, with the winner being featured on your menu.
• Let followers vote on their most preferred desert in your menu.

At the same time, you should be wary of overflowing the feed with too many competitions. Too many contests over a short period could project a bad image on your brand and take the fun away out of the competitions.

Easy to Book

Whenever people like what they see on your restaurant’s social media pages, they will consider paying you a visit. One of the mistakes is failing to provide clear information on how to reach you or how to book a table.

You can make this easy for prospects by including a link to your table reservation or menus from your social media accounts. Make sure other sections of your profiles are accurately filled-in, such as:

• Contact details
• Email address
• Location addresses

Along with making your profiles look complete, you will also target people who are actively looking to contact a restaurant, or make a reservation.

Incentivize Reviews

When in doubt, people typically look at their peers to make a decision. Sharing one’s dining experience at any establishment has become the norm for consumers.

Consequently you will need to collect tons of positive customer reviews to convince them. Your Google My Business and directory listings should be backed by glowing testimonials to do that.

You should focus on collecting reviews on restaurant browsing sites like TripAdvisor. These sites are visited by both local people and tourists, giving you an extra boost of awareness and visibility if you can appear on the top-rated restaurant list for your city. You can also provide discount codes or special offers to incentivize customers to leave reviews.

With Instagram playing a huge part in customer interactions, copying and pasting your customer reviews from review platforms onto your social media profiles could be an effective way to get the most out of them.