social media marketing for restaurants
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Social Media Marketing for Restaurants
Restaurants seem to pop up on a weekly basis making staying on top of marketing extremely important for those who
want to remain successful. There are a variety of strategies to use social media marketing for restaurants that can
definitely help to increase the customer base.
Location Marketing
There are a variety of location marketing websites focusing on social media marketing for restaurants. Some of the main
ones include FourSquare and Food Spotting. FourSquare uses the GPS functionality of the smart phones nearly everyone
seems to be using to help to map out what restaurants are offering and where they are. Restaurants can sign up for the
service to help know who is visiting and when they are there while patrons can unlock new features and earn badges for
mapping out the culinary world around them. Food Spotting allows customers to easily upload pictures of menu items,
rate them, map them out and recommend them to other users.
Blogging
Nearly everyone has a blog these days and those interested in social media marketing for restaurants are certainly no
exception to this rule. Restaurant SEO should focus on the type of menu being offered to help narrow down the search
field as well as the location the restaurant is located in. Whether the company offers deep dish pizza in Chicago or Italian
cuisine in New York makes a huge difference in how the blog is rated. Write blog posts about things such as menu items,
celebrity guests and upcoming events to help form a relationship with potential customers. Restaurant SEO is important
but content is still king. The point is to communicate with the audience.
People who specialize in giving restaurant marketing advice use Facebook as one of the key social media strategies.
Facebook can help restaurants to gain new clientele and can help to gauge how effective the company’s online
strategies are. The timeline version of Facebook allows business owners to more closely monitor how many people are
viewing posts and can more easily place Facebook ads to be seen in locally targeted areas. Social media marketing for
restaurants can use Facebook to announce daily specials with mouth-watering pictures, allow guests to upload pictures
to the restaurant’s page, announce contests and giveaways for clientele and much, much more, all with minimal effort.
Another extremely popular social marketing website right now is Pinterest. This website allows users to post pictures
and links to various boards. Social media marketing for restaurants cannot discount this website’s influence now that
users can post pins automatically to their Facebook pages. TechCrunches has reported that this website has reached ten
million unique visitors per month faster than any other standalone website in history. Restaurants can use this site in a
number of different ways, such as pinning pictures from great reviews from food critics, conducting contests from
followers who pin something from their blog, and posting pictures of new menu items, ingredients and restaurant décor.
Blog Campaigns
Restaurants can even partner with other local bloggers to have reviews, giveaways and coupon offers to their readers.
Social media marketing for restaurants can use the power of bloggers specializing in food, cooking, parenting, mommy
bloggers or location specific bloggers. This type of social media campaign can help restaurants to increase in popularity
and give them brand recognition to help reach a larger, more varied audience that may be virtually unreachable through
other means. Look for blogs with good Google Page Ranks and high readership to get the most exposure possible.
Last but definitely not least, Twitter is extremely popular, especially with the foodie crowd. It is amazing how much can
be said within 140 characters and a picture. Restaurant social media marketing can easily combine Twitter with a
restaurant’s main website, blog and Facebook pages to help to gain followers and increase sales exponentially. Twitter is
also an easy way to release limited numbers of coupons and offer giveaways to followers who re-tweet.
There are a huge number of ways that restaurants can use social media to help expand their business and increase sales.
Everything from huge restaurants to small mom and pop joints can benefit from these sorts of marketing strategies. In
general, these strategies are all aimed at increasing communication with customers and improving customer relations.