Facebook Marketing for restaurants is very important

Why is this the case?

Restaurants have always benefited from word of mouth, more than other types of business.

How many times has someone suggested a restaurant to you for an evening out with your partner, a special occasion or simply because the place offers a great experience?

It is a natural progression that social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Vine and others, have become the new way to share these experiences.

There was some great research done by 360i regarding why people share food images and what they are sharing. I have borrowed a couple of their diagrams to illustrate this.

You can see that the motivations vary, though many of these are related to what people are eating on a day to day basis, special occasions and restaurant reviews.

As a restaurant owner or marketer, you need to be in tune with this trend, in order to use this to generate better engagement with customers and drive new visitors to your restaurant.

What types of food are people sharing?

Another interesting aspect of the research focused on what foods are shared most frequently. Sweets and desserts top the list. That might not be a surprise to you. Maybe because people feel that they are being a little naughty by enjoying an extravagant dessert. Or perhaps they are trying to make their friends envious.

How can we tap into this to increase our customers?

There is no doubt that by enabling people to find out about the food we are producing, we can encourage them to visit us and try our restaurant for themselves.

It can get a bit complicated, because ideally we need the images link back to our own pages and therefore our Facebook page and websites must be correctly optimised. This no easy task but once it is in place, all of your own images can be shared easily too.

If you need help with this, we have already set this up for a variety of different restaurants as part of our restaurant marketing solution, so get in touch on 01772 978 199.