If you’ve ever been on Instagram, scrolling through your newsfeed, it’d be really hard not to notice enticing photos of food adorned with the hashtag: #foodporn. Instagram is ridden with glorious photos of food, ironically not from the restaurant itself, but from diners that want their followers to enviously drool over what they’re having for dinner. This trend is a golden opportunity for restaurants to latch onto – this article will teach you how to use Instagram to help your restaurant business succeed!
1. Crafting Your Own Personal Brand
Instagram simplifies restaurant branding down to a few features – posts, stories, videos, direct messaging (DMs) and comments. By being responsive to user’s enquiries on your Instagram page, you will give off the impression that your team is helpful and friendly. This helps build your personal branding as consumer-centric and focused on providing the best dinning experience. Such engagement can be done through replying to comments or direct messages – which only takes a few seconds of your time and did I mention, is completely free of charge?
Want to make your restaurant even more community orientated and homely? You can utilise the Instagram Story function to show behind the scenes snippets of your restaurant to create a sense of familiarity among your consumers.
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2. Free Advertising
Resorting to distributing flyers to increase your lunch crowd? Your existing diners could possibly do a better job than you with their Instagrams! On your end, all you have to do is to make sure that the dishes you serve are aesthetically pleasing and completely #instagrammable. When your customer uploads pictures of your food onto their personal accounts, it creates a word of mouth among their friends and followers of your good food.
Plus, potential consumers who are considering to frequent your restaurant, can easily check GeoTags and tagged photos of your account to see “real-time” photos of your food and the interior design of your restaurant. This feature is so accessible that it is sure to build a steady flow of potential customers into your restaurant!
So what are you waiting for? Create an Instagram page for your restaurant business now and encourage your consumers to tag you in their posts and stories!
3. Get To Know Your Consumers
Besides engaging with your consumers through comments and direct messages, Instagram’s polling feature on your story allows you to understand their preferences better. You can do a quick poll with this feature to find out, for example, if they’re more keen on wholegrain bread or white bread.
This poll acts as a secondary voice as to what you hear in your own restaurant and it allows you to reach new and potential consumers and entice them in with new ingredients or dishes.
4. Get to Know Your Competitors
Your competitors are likely to have Instagram pages as well. Regularly checking their pages to see what new dishes or promotions they have is honestly the fastest way to keep up with them and adjust your prices accordingly.
Following Instagram famous restaurants also allows you to replicate how they interact with their consumers and what they post so that you can reach the same level of engagement – but with your own personal branding.
Actionable Takeaway:
Instagram has many features that can be maximised to reach a larger audience of consumers while creating brand loyalty at the same time. If you haven’t set up an Instagram business account for your restaurant, now would be the best time to!
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