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For your restaurant social media strategy to be effective, you will need to get up to speed with the latest design trends in social media for restaurant owners. Below are some great rules we created with the help of our friends from VistaCreate.

Restaurant Social Media Ideas

Be Informative and Offer Value

This goes without saying, but you will need to let customers know which platforms you currently exist on. Your restaurant social media handle should be easy to find online, represent your brand, and resonate with your target audience.

Make sure that you incorporate these items into your restaurant social media:

The business logo
The type of business
The hours of business
The dishes your business specializes in
Whether or not food delivery is available
The businesses location
The businesses contact details
A link to your website

You will need to also:

Choose an easy-to-remember social media handle
Include your unique selling point in the description

For added effect try adding hashtags to your bio to describe your restaurant’s vibe, and make it easier for people to make a quick judgment on whether or not you’re their best choice.

Remain Relevant and Trendy

Your messaging should be in lockstep with the current trends. Make sure that you stay on top of trending subjects, hashtags, and memes to continue your conversations with clients.

You can also include seasonal dishes or dishes of the day to entice where pictures can go a long way. You can also advertise holiday specials ahead of time so people can book for the holiday.

Taking up current trends can help you create the content that users want from your restaurant, and engage with them in the ways they expect. This brings you high levels of visibility, as your post shows up, even to non-followers.

On the explore pages, people see trending posts and stories that align with their interests based on the posts they normally engage with. When trending posts and stories show up for a specific hashtag, it means that the user searched for that hashtag and is interested in that topic.

This offers you an opportunity to connect with people who have interests in trending topics. It could even help you attract new followers of your restaurant.

Interact and Engage with your Audience

Engage with customers and make sure to have frequent updates for them on special offerings, the dish of the day, freebees, quizzes or respond to comments or queries.

Run competitions, quizzes and ask patrons to post their favorite pics at your establishment. You can also run polls among your audience asking them if they like red or white wine or what their favorite pizza topping is. Also, make sure that you respond promptly to comments even when they might be negative.

Simply put, social media engagement is the measurement of comments, likes and shares. It’s like a dinner party where you need to welcome guests and make sure that the conversation flows. Strong social media engagements through polls, surveys, likes and comments ensure that you make strong connections with current and prospective customers of your restaurant.

Engagement is much better than simply racking up followers.

Show Your Human Side

Interact like a human being. It’s important to humanize your establishment. Put a face to the name, and maintain relationships with your target audience online. Show your giving side by supporting charities or endorsing local events.If you and your staff run charity fundraisers, or have a compelling story about your staff share it with your audience.

Dedicate restaurant social media posts to team members and post a picture of them working in the restaurant and include their favorite guest experience or their favorite dish. When you receive comments on your content, always respond to them to generate a real conversation.

Address complaints or concerns and always thank customers for positive comments. Engaging with your customers in this way will show that there is a real person behind your brand that cares about the customers, rather than a robot handling the interactions.

Humanizing your brand not only helps grow your restaurant business but will also encourage more interaction with your content. Some great ways to humanize your business could be the use of videos, putting a face to a name, using emotions, sharing personal stories of your staff, and more.

Collaborate with Local Social Media Influencers

Today influencers have mastered the art of selling. They are constantly coming up with compelling content that encourages people to like, share and comment. They can help you craft content and productions that can appeal to your target audience making your messages more organic coming from real people which audiences relate to.

Influencers’ appeal comes from the fact that they often inspire, encourage, and motivate their audience. Using social media influencers offers a relatively quick and high-impact alternative to promote your business, reinforce your image, and strengthen connections to your most impassioned clients.

With the support of influencers, you can promote your restaurant as well as create new content in your social media outreach. You can even make influencers your brand ambassadors so that every time people see your influencer at an event, they trust the brand more.

Besides generating buzz and followers for your restaurant, social media influencers can also offer valuable insights into your target audience, offer editorial and production support and help to create some great content.

Plan, Plan and Plan Some More

Your restaurant social media outreach can only succeed if you make sure you have an actionable plan. Planning your restaurant social media strategy will help you get through the intricacies required for your success.

Make sure your plan defines explicitly what the key milestones you want to reach are and how you can measure your success. Each of your strategic goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). You will need to create an engagement plan and make sure that the content you create aligns with your brand voice, value and personality.

Restaurant social media outreach is not only about creating the best posts possible but also about knowing when the best times to post are, and how you can reach your target audience. By having a well-thought-out content calendar you will be able to know what to put out and when to post and have the conversation flowing throughout the year, holidays, and special occasions for your restaurant. Once you get the hang of churning out regular content you can then use feedback to tweak content based on engagement from your audience.

Create Marketing Material

Creating your restaurant marketing collateral doesn’t have to be difficult. Platforms like VistaCreate offer graphic design solutions that meet the needs of both pros and novices alike. VistaCreate is an online graphic design tool that helps users to create designs from thousands of design templates with different formats for social media, print, and web projects.

This graphic design platform comes with over 50 million creative assets including images, videos, and vectors for any print-on-demand design project. VistaCreate offers a great selection of ready-made design solutions for restaurants, cafes, or bars that will make your social media marketing stand out.

VistaCreate Can be the Right Fit for You

Good quality food and services are no longer enough to run a thriving business. This means finding innovative ways to improve on-site and off-site experiences for guests. Besides the quality offerings, you need to turn your restaurant business into a brand that people can trust.

What’s great about VistaCreate is that it is easy to set up and use for beginners. This means you can go about creating videos, animations, graphics, ads, or even your branding collateral. You will not run out of choices for your social media campaign as it offers over 50,000 templates with no download limits which you can use directly or customize.

You will have access to over 50 million royalty-free photos, videos, vectors and more. If you still don’t know where to start, you can get inspired by browsing through templates based on industry-specific designs for your restaurant business.

With its media kit functionality features, you don’t need to worry about your lack of graphic design knowledge. Designing your restaurant marketing collateral is a cinch thanks to its intuitive photo editor, where you can add your logo, incorporate your brand components, play around with fonts, and even add other visual elements to your designs including animation, sound effects, and more. Check their industry-specific designs for free.

This article, “Social Media Design Tips for Restaurant Owners” was first published on Small Business Trends