How to Leverage Instagram to Make Your Restaurant More Successful
As many small business owners will testify, a presence on Instagram can be an advantage for driving the visibility and engagement of the target audience. Because Instagram is a visually centric social media platform, the restaurant industry is among the best positioned to take advantage of the various features of Instagram like business profiles, advanced metrics, live streaming, Stories, and more.
According to studies, consumers in the age group of 18-25 spend five days in a year looking at images of food on Instagram, and a whopping 30% would tend to avoid a visit to a restaurant that does not impress on Instagram. With this kind of influence on diners, restaurant owners must master the art of leveraging Instagram to build reputations and drive footfalls. Some effective tactics:
Approach the Maximum Number of Food Bloggers
The advantage of having a food blogger reviewing your restaurant is obvious. It can give you good exposure to numerous followers interested in a quality dining experience. You should increase the number of your invitations to such a point that you don’t leave out anyone who is anyone in the business of food blogging. If you look around seriously, you will be able to discover almost everyone in your city or at least the main areas from where your diners come in.
While you can be sure that the food bloggers who have a large following and are well entrenched will charge you handsomely, you will also be able to get many others to review your food for the price of the free meal. The choice of the food bloggers you invite will be based on the number of their followers.
Typically, you will get good value from those who have 30,000-50,000 followers, while bloggers with more than that tend to be more expensive. However, you should always try to get the biggest food bloggers first and then go down the list.
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Run Contests
While you can always conduct the contests on your Instagram page all by yourself, the impact will be less as it would be limited to the people who are already following you. Partnering with an influencer can help you to access a large audience who may not have ever visited you or even heard of you.
While increasing the amount of the prize money or the diner coupon will get you better participation, you must also limit the number of contests with the same influencer to a maximum of two. By collaborating with more influencers, you will be able to access a larger number of potential customers.
Make the participation in the contest as simple as possible and try to work with the influencer so that he posts consistently over the week for the best possible exposure. If need be, you can buy Instagram comments to create a buzz. Make an event with the contest winners sharing a grand dinner with the influencer to benefit from the posts that will invariably follow,
Compose Compelling Content
Even though you need to pay attention to choosing and posting images of very high quality on Instagram, there is no reason to assume that text has no part to play. The impact of the posts can be significantly increased with the addition of smart and value-added captions.
However, restaurant owners will need to remember that as important as it is to write interesting copy that will make the audience stick around longer; you should refrain from writing long copy.
Instagram users are notorious for being impatient and have no interest in reading long blocks of text when they can just see high-quality photographs. The point is to tell a story without getting carried away.
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The best way of ensuring that it remains punchy is to limit its length to that of a tweet. You must always remember that the hero of your story is the photograph with the text acting as the no doubt important but all the same, as a supporting actor.
Pay Attention to Hashtag Research
Even after you have invested a lot of time and effort in shooting the best food photographs and crafting compelling captions, you may still find that your posts are not getting the kind of engagement. It is possible that the posts are not being discovered by your audience.
You can rectify the situation by conducting hashtag research and including the most relevant ones in your posts. It is important to remember that searches for content on Instagram are only possible using hashtags. According to Adweek, Instagram posts with hashtags get 12.6% more engagement than those without any.
Conclusion
Instagram can be a very productive social media platform for restaurant businesses given the obsession consumers have today for posting their dining experiences. The point is to post very high-quality and interesting images with compelling captions that capture the imagination of Instagram users. By researching the times when your target audience is most active, and by using a content scheduling tool, you can ensure that you increase their chance of seeing your posts.
How to Leverage Instagram to Make Your Restaurant More Successful