3 Basic Ways To Optimize Twitter for Restaurant Owners
If you are in the first stages of launching a bigger web presence for your restaurant, then you may be looking into creating a Twitter profile for your business. While the social network does have some major benefits to small business owners and restaurateurs specifically, the site has a bit of a learning curve, and isn’t as intuitive as some of it’s competitors. Here are three basic things you need to do to optimize your twitter as a restaurant owner.
- Build a Following
On twitter, you will be sending “tweets” or short messages, into the online ether. Most of the people who see your tweets will be “followers,” who have elected to follow your account and get updates from you. So the first thing you will need to do to get the most out of your twitter account is build up that following.
There are two basic ways that you can build a twitter page following. First, advertise your twitter page to your regular customers, friends, family, and fans. You can do this easily by posting links to your twitter page on other social networks like Facebook, or hanging a sign in your shop urging people to “follow” you.
Second, you can build follower by following other restaurants in your area, industry leaders, and other pages related to your specific eatery. By interacting with the pages of others, you may gain them as followers, or expose your business to their fanbase, which will lead to more followers for you!
- Use Hashtags
Hashtags, represented by the # sign on twitter, are what made the network so innovative to begin with, and are very important to optimizing your twitter account. When you use a hashtag, you link your post to anyone else who has used the same hashtag. For example, if you use the hashtag #goodfood when posting a new menu item, when a user clicks on the hashtag #goodfood on any one else’s post, they will have a chance of seeing your post.
- Post Just Enough!
There are whole books written about how often you should and can post, but just remember that twitter is very different from other social networks in this regard. On twitter, your followers will see a feed of everyone they are following that will update quickly, so it can be appropriate to update your twitter multiple times per hour. But don’t post more than that: posting several times a minute will look like spam to your followers!