How Restaurants Can Use Social Media To Grow Their Business

Have you ever scrolled through your feed on social media to find pictures of food or your friends "checking in" to their favorite restaurant? Imagine if that was your restaurant or your dish? How great would this exposure be with just the click of a button?  The majority of people want their friends and family to know what they are up to at all times (based on behavior).  Social media makes this very easy with just a few clicks on a smart phone or tablet.  Let's go through some ways that a restaurant can capitalize on this behavior and get more customers in the door. Hungry for those tips? Sorry couldn't resist.  Okay, let's go!



1. Facebook check in: Restaurants should encourage their diners to check-in on Facebook.  They can put signs at the front or have a subtle reminder in the menu.  Keep in mind that most people will do this anyway.  It's become natural behavior. If a restaurant doesn't have a Facebook page, diners can't check in.  The value of this action is that all of the diner's friends and family are now exposed to the restaurant!  Imagine if a diner checks in and has 800-1,000 friends. Mass exposure!

Checking in on Facebook

2. Show The Food: Posting a picture of a mouth-watering meal just before lunch or dinner will entice a few people that had not made up their mind on their dining destination to come on in and give a new restaurant a try (or can serve as a reminder to an old favorite).  Smart phones have such great cameras now that this can be done rather quickly.  Prepare the dish, snap the pic, upload and viola!

3. Search Twitter: Twitter is an amazing tool, but it's not just for posting content. You can also use it to search for conversations and gracefully join in.  Example: If you owned a Mexican food restaurant, you could search for terms like, "I am so hungry" or, "Tex-Mex", or "Mexican food" in a 10 to 15 mile radius of your location.  Imagine someone tweeting, "I really want some Tex-Mex for lunch".  You could write back saying, "We understand! Come on in, we have some great specials today!" or something to that effect.


4. Announce specials and other events:  There is no quicker way (in my humble opinion, of course) to get the word out about ANYTHING than through social media. What's great about running a restaurant is that you can change things on the fly. For instance, if you need a little bump in dinner sales you can run a special and post it to all of your networks and let all of your followers know at once. Just make sure you're well staffed! ;) Restaurants can also use their social media pages to broadcast events, new menus or special hours.



5. Pin recipes: If you followed my blog for a while, then you know I am all about leading with value. This means to feed the "what's in it for me?" mentality (which is just human nature).  A restaurant can give value by sharing recipes, nutrition tips and dinner ideas on their Pinterest pages.  Obviously they would not be giving away the secret sauce, but some basic helpful ideas would not hurt. Value leads to trust and trust leads to more business.


6. Show pics of restaurant, staff and kitchen: Nothing gives more insight and shows a business off like pictures of their facility and staff. A restaurant is no different.  Show off that dining room, show the friendly staff eager to serve, and for extra credit, go "behind the scenes" and get some pics of the kitchen and some preparation of meals in progress.  This shows future guests that your kitchen is so clean and efficient that you're willing to expose it to the world! Make it fun and make it social!



Word of mouth marketing is huge in the restaurant business and social media is a great tool to use to get more mouths talking about a dining establishment.  I hope these tips help and please share this with a restaurant owner that you know that could use some more business.  As always, if they can't keep up with a busy lunch rush and their social media, we'd be happy to assist!

How To Drive Traffic To Your Website With Social Media

We've all heard the question, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it...you can probably finish that sentence.  Well, if we have a great website, but no one visits, does it exist? It may, but it's not doing much good.  Social media is great for interacting with, engaging with, and sharing helpful information with our target audiences. What a lot of business owners do not realize is that it's also great for driving traffic to their websites.  After all, chances are you are on my website right now as a result of clicking on a link from one of my social media profiles (unless you're one of my email subscribers. Thank you by the way). In a perfect world, people would just type in a keyword phrase into a search engine like Google, and we would be the 1st option on page 1 and we would get tons of traffic that way.  Let's face it...not everyone can be on page 1. So do we just give up on getting people to our websites? Nope! Here are some tips to get them there via social media.



1. Fill out profiles: Most social media profiles have a spot for our website URLs.  Be sure to complete all profiles completely.  Sometimes as people are clicking through our pages, they come across our websites and we get a bonus visit.


2. Link directly to your site from your profiles:  Here is a real example of how I drive traffic to my website via Twitter.  Basically, I have a headline leading to a blog post (if you don't have an active blog, you can guide them to a certain page on your website.  Here is the tweet:

Want people to comment on your posts? Try these 4 things: http://t.co/oUiepPveZV #mckinney pic.twitter.com/lJWd7zUz2g
— Market With Mario (@Marketwithmario) July 31, 2014

The key is to shorten the link. This makes it look cleaner.  Tip: Use a tool like goo.gl or bitly as those are the most trustworthy for people to click on.  Once someone clicks the link, they're on our website! Boom! This is how it looks on Facebook:

This is how it looks on Google Plus:

3. YouTube Description and Video:  Here's a neat little trick. When creating a YouTube video, add your URL to the beginning of your video description (pictured with the arrow). This is a clickable link and people will get curious and click, I promise.

You can also add text to your video and have a call to action to have people visit your website. Just be sure to give a selfish reason such as, "visit our website for tips on..."


4. Pinterest: Pinterest is an amazing tool to use to drive traffic directly to your website (especially if you have pictures of products or projects on your site). This is what it looks like as a pin:

Now here's what's cool: Once someone clicks on this pin while on Pinterest, it will take them directly to our website!  Edit your pin and check its website source to be sure your URL is included (you can also direct them to a certain page of your site).  Here's what I mean:

5. Include on business cards and email signature:  When designing business cards and creating email signatures, be sure to include your website (you'd be surprised how many times this is overlooked). Most people today will check us out before calling for a quote or even before a coffee meeting.




Search Engine Optimization is an important tool in marketing, but businesses that do not have the budget to outrank their competition (clean, effective SEO is not cheap), on Google then these tips above will help accomplish the goal of getting potential buyers and clients to your websites.  Please feel free to leave a comment and share with a friend that this may help. Thanks!