Who else is not on social media?
We all know that our customers are indeed on various social media platforms. People spend hours on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc.
Consequently, being in the restaurant business, we also need to be present where they are at. They are there hanging out, so we got to join their party.
But the question is, how are we going to know if we are doing it right or wrong?
There could be five possible ways that you are using social media wrong, and that's why the result you are getting isn't outstanding:
1. You have not defined success on social media.
Have you defined success on social media for your business?
How does success look like? If you do not understand where you're going, how do you know if you got there? You must clearly define what you need to get out of social media.
What are your intentions, why is your business on social media? Why do you have a Facebook or Instagram page for your restaurant?
What are you hoping to get? If you want to get more customers or more sales, how do you measure that you are indeed getting those?
You must measurably define success for you to know if it has been achieved.
2. You are just focused on sales.
If your business is on social media and your only goal is to increase your sales, then you are not maximizing the usage of this powerful tool.
Have you thought about growing the database of your customers?
Have you thought about building relationships?
How can you form a tribe or a community on social media?
Social media is substantial in ensuring that your customers know all of your dishes. Often times, they order the same thing.
But through social media, you can tell stories about your foods. This way, customers may consider trying something that is "new" to their tongue.
Social media is also valuable in acquiring direct feedback from your customers. Instead of going through other "indirect" routes like Yelp, Google Plus, and other review sites, they can quickly send you a message using messenger. That is very powerful.
If you are just on Facebook for sales, and not defining all these different ways you can serve your customers and build your brand, you are using social media wrong.
3. You have not set a system in place to measure sales that come from social media.
You need to set up some guidelines or standards for you to measure success in using it.
Sadly, many business owners do not realize this. Some would say they have done Facebook Ads once, and it did not work.
My question is, again, how do you measure success? How do you know if you've got sales from it? Did you have a specific promo code?
Did you create an offer that is exclusive to your Facebook or Instagram followers?
A lot of times, they don't. They just post something on social media, maybe, a photo or video, and that's it. So even if they receive phone calls about it, they don't know if it is from social media or not.
It is necessary to create specific offers to specific platforms. This way, you can measure success.
Have specific promo codes, deals or offers for Instagram, Facebook, email marketing, text marketing and etc.
4. You are using social media like it’s 2017!
Three to five years ago, organic reach was what it was.
This means that posting organically on social media back then was that most of the people who are part of your community or the followers of your page would see your post.
However, at present, the organic reach is down.
You need to spend on ads for you to reach your audience. It becomes a pay to play kind of a platform.
You need to understand that if you don't have new strategies in place, and you are not using these powerful tools as if it is 2019 or 2020, then you are using it wrong.
The way it used to work before is no longer as effective as it is now.
5. You don’t batch your content!
Most social media users in our industry tend to overlook batching things.
You need to batch content creation. Capture photos and take videos. Batch-create the captions that go with your posts, and then batch schedule everything.
This is how we spend less than an hour to schedule all our social media content for the whole month.
Batching is the same technique we use for our email and text message marketing to schedule our messages for the entire month.
Money-generating activities, which include setting these social media content, email and text message marketing, and then mapping out your promotions, need to be batch scheduled and automated.
What's working and what's not working on social media is continually changing over the years. So you and I, as restaurant owners, need to take the time to figure out what is serving and what's not.
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