Social media is a great way for your restaurant to engage with your customers while building customer loyalty. When you add social media to your restaurant’s marketing strategy, you can increase awareness and motivate diners to walk in the door.

Engaging your customer is more than offering specials and deals. It’s about creating a relationship with your customers, enticing them with your food. Marketing on Facebook takes a lighter touch if you want to promote your restaurant successfully. Customers love to hear about new menu items and promotional events, but Facebook browsers don’t want to feel like they’re locked in a room with an aggressive time-share salesperson.

Fасеbооk promotional campaigns that work and attract viral attention do so because they’re funny, light hearted, visually compelling, and designed for easy sharing. Restaurants can easily, become overly promotional, but the best Facebook ideas provide the right mix of humour, information, customer service, and special offers.

Show Off Your Goods

Food not only tastes and smells delicious — it looks beautiful, too. Post pictures of your dishes like Hill Country does, because those "food porn" pictures are sure to make people salivate and get them in the door. There's a reason things like Foodspotting exists — people like looking at artful food. However, Spurlock has a word of caution before you start uploading pictures: "Make sure that the photos are appetizing because not all mobile photos of food turn out appetizing, even if it does look nice on the plate."

Arguably, the very best way to promote your restaurant online is with high-quality, drool-inducing photos. Visual content is in high demand online these days, and having delicious looking photos on your website and across various social media outlets is essential for drawing hungry eyes.

Geo target your ads

A new Facebook feature allows advertisers to target consumers based on zip codes, which means you can blast an ad to those who live within walking distance of your restaurant. There are some tricks of the trade when exploring the world of Fасеbооk advertising and can be an effective way to build your fan base on Facebook.

Facebook ads let you do all kinds of very specific, niche targeting. For restaurants and dinners, this is ideal. You can target your ads to be seen only by people in your particular geographic location. You can also target your ads to be seen by those with specific likes, and by those who like certain pages.

Develop Your Restaurant’s Brand Identity

Building your restaurant’s brand identity can have a big affect on your social media performance. Your goal should be to build your restaurant’s identity around your targeted customers.

Do your food target patrons prefer healthy eating? Or does your restaurant have a more beer-and-wings kind of vibe? Understand who your target patrons are, then build your brand around what they are interested in. Reflect these interests on your social media platforms and in your promotional material.

Yes, your restaurant is a business, and your goal is to make a profit. But you don’t have to do the hard sell on Facebook — oftentimes restaurants are overly promotional. Think about your brand and then try to find the right mix of promotions and special offers, education, customer service, engagement, etc. Use a diverse set of content to establish and build your brand.

Be consistent Online and Offline

Make sure your community managers are as well-versed in your restaurant food and service and intangibles as your best employees in the field. You don’t want people to get answers on Facebook and hear different story when they show up for dinner. It can be difficult to maintain seamless communication: especially if there are different locations. They might have different offerings or hours, but it’s important to stay in the loop and make sure that the information put out by your restaurant is accurate and consistent across all platforms, whether they be social platforms or in-person. Being inconsistent will lead to confusion and frustration for your customers, who may feel like they were promised one thing, only to be told something else upon arrival.

Contests and Sweepstakes

Use social sweepstakes and contests on your Facebook Page. These social promotions add excitement, and a great reason to get your customers coming back to both your Facebook Page and your restaurant.

This is a terrific way to build engagement on your Facebook page. Pick one fan per week and highlight them on your Facebook page. Consider inviting the fan of the week into your kitchen to “cook” with your chef. Take photos and post them on your page. You could also forgo the cooking session and take a photo of your Facebook Fan eating in your restaurant. Highlight their favourite dish and even offer it to them for free. Facebook marketing like this is certain to boost your engagement.

Lastly, remember that Fасеbооk is a social platform, and the most successful restaurants using Fасеbооk for their restaurant marketing are leveraging the social atmosphere. They are sharing interesting and engaging content, mouth-watering photos of their food, tips and tricks and more. Then, they pepper their posts with a few coupons or outright sales pieces.

How to Use Facebook at Your Restaurant: How to Market With Facebook