Best Practices for Promoting Your Restaurant Using Instagram

Author: Drew Piotrowski

Instagram can be a powerful tool for letting consumers know about your restaurant. When used effectively it can take your establishment to the next level, driving greater sales, garnering a more engaged clientele and bringing new customers through your door. Here are five tips to keep in mind when using your restaurant’s Instagram account.

Photo Quality – the pictures you post are a direct reflection of your establishment. Make sure the photos are high quality, iPhone cameras work great. When thinking of what to post restaurants have a distinct advantage, it’s no secret we love to look at pictures of food. Here’s your chance to show off your cuisine. How appetizing can you make it look? With that said don’t forget to show off the more personal side of your restaurant, mix in pictures of your wait staff, chef, and happy customers.

Description – the description is one of the most crucial elements to getting your message across. Here’s your chance to tell a story, be comical and clever, announce an upcoming event, whatever you can come up with. Constantly test new strategies to find what works best and keep the content fresh.

Targeting – Instagram (read Facebook) gives you access to powerful tools to reach your target market. You can use them to pinpoint geographic locations, interests, age groups, and genders. This allows you to display posts to folks that aren’t following your page, maybe have never heard of your restaurant, but fit your usual customer’s mold. You can even use this to find new customer segments you never knew existed.

The Regularity of Posting – a popular route is having weekly campaigns, maybe some type of customer of the week, or featured menu item. This gives you something to post with regularity as well as creating a sense of familiarity for your followers.

Get your customers to help you – people love to take pictures of their food, especially when it looks good. Encourage your patrons to share the pictures they take on social media. This is one of the best ways to reach new audiences.

If you keep these tips in mind and explore new ideas you can be truly surprised by Instagram’s impact on your business. It’s an amazing tool, that is relatively inexpensive to use, with nearly unlimited upside potential. Play around with your account, if something doesn’t work try something else. Most importantly have fun while doing it, it will reflect on your company’s page!