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Create an Instagram account for your restaurant
It can be very interesting that your restaurant is on Instagram: with only six years of life it has more than 500 million active users sharing photos daily.
With its full integration with Facebook, Instagram is a perfect marketing tool for restaurants. You can have the posts you make on Instagram be published at the same time on Facebook.
The other advantage of Instagram is the fact that it does not require time; While Facebook requires a more in-depth study of the strategy, which practically forces you to hire a professional, Instagram is more carefree and you can manage it yourself with your mobile.
For your restaurant to succeed on Instagram, I offer you some very useful tips that are easy to implement.
- Make use of hashtags
Hashtags are tags that work to group a topic in a conversation thread. They were used for the first time on Twitter but we already see them on almost all social networks, they are those words preceded by the number sign (#).
If you use very popular hashtags in your photos, you will have a lot of visibility and potential customers. In the United States for example, there is a cheese cake day, and the hashtag is #cheesecakeday.
If you don’t know which hashtag to use, use Top Tags, it tells you which ones are the most popular at all times.
- Pleasure crowdsource occasionally
An example from galeevaj’s Instagram account
El crowdsource It is a technique that consists of asking your audience to use the information obtained in your restaurant.
It would be like making your restaurant customers work for you. I propose three ideas:
- Post a photo of a new dish on Instagram and ask for help naming it. Whoever contributes the best gets a free dinner for five people.
- Create a hashtag, and ask your customers to post pictures of the dish that should be heading your menu instead of the one you currently have
- Another hashtag for customers to propose new dishes a la carte, can be a pizza or a breakfast.
- Design your food to be photographed
Food is already eaten with the eyes. People share a lot of food on Instagram. Some comedians say that it is an invention of mothers to know what their children eat … Take advantage of this: design your food to be photographed.
Look on Instagram for pictures of the food that you offer in your restaurant and see how it is plated and try to emulate and overcome that … But do not settle for the plating, add ornaments, a cool table, colorful cutlery, etc.
- Show life behind the stove
People are looking for people, not a brand. The best marketing tactic in the world is that: humanize the business.
From time to time upload photos of your kitchen, parties, etc. I will not go too deep because we have mentioned it on several occasions. We better leave you an example of Quique Dacosta, one of the best chefs in Spain.
- The special of the day
If your restaurant usually offers a special dish a day, either because you only offer it that day, because it is on sale or whatever…. Always post it!
And don’t forget to create a cool hashtag for the dish of the day, and easy to remember so that your customers see what it is on a daily basis.
- Instagram is video
An example from Zerdoquito’s Instagram Account
Do not forget that Instagram is not only photography: it is also video. Videos must be shorter than those on your YouTube channel, no more than one minute long.
Upload cooking tips, secrets of your restaurant, the arrival of a notable client, a fragment of how your best dish is cooked, the views from your terrace, etc.
- Do not forget to geolocate
The goal is not only to make you popular on Instagram, it is to attract customers, as it cannot be otherwise. How will your clients know where you are?
Simple, it turns your Instagram profile into a business page, so you can add your address and locate it on the map.
Then, and in all your publications, add the location to each one of them, so that your customers can see the name of the restaurant and its map. If you don’t know how, I’ll leave you a screenshot so you can see where it is added.
- Contests!
We all love free food Offer it!
El crowdsource that I mentioned before you can do it through contests; But you can also create other types of contests on Instagram, for example the one that has uploaded the most photos of your restaurant, the one that “I like you the most” with a dish of yours, and so on.
Don’t forget to use hashtags in your contests and make participating in them fun.