Efficiency Tips for Restaurant Social Networks

All small business owners are pressed for time, but restauranteurs are probably some of the busiest people in the world.  As a restaurant owner, you need to be constantly thinking about your staff, your food, your bottom line, and all of the countless details that come together to make your business work.  All of these concerns can make it very hard to devote time and energy to marketing and promoting your business, which is why it’s a smart idea to do everything you can to make sure that your promotion efforts are as efficient as possible.  Here are three tips to help you promote your restaurant on social media as efficiently as you can.

1. Embrace Existing Tech Tools

There are so many social media platforms out there that it would be a full-time job to try to keep every possible profile updated and actively promoting your business, but there are a few great tech tools in the market that can help you manage multiple accounts on different social media platforms more efficiently.  One of the best reviewed and most powerful is called Hootsuite, and it’s a great tool to look into as a restaurant owner.

Hootsuite does a few things very well that make it a great productivity tool that can help you manage your social accounts more easily.  First off, after syncing your social media accounts with Hootsuite, you will be able to see all of your different accounts in one place, saving you the time it takes to bounce between different platforms.  Second, Hootsuite lets you schedule posts ahead of time from their dashboard.  Rather than taking a time every day to keep your profiles updated, you can take an hour or two at the start of the week, schedule posts ahead of time, and not worry about your accounts again until you run out of content.

Hootsuite isn’t the only tech tool out there, but it’s a very powerful one and a great way to streamline your social media promotion.  Plus, they have a free version, so you can try out this tool without any monetary investment.

2. Crowdsource Your Content

Finding links, interesting resources, and amusing things to post on your social media accounts can be very time-consuming.  But there’s an easy and straightforward way to get your hands on  interesting content that you know your audience will enjoy and connect with: ask them what they want to see!  By crowdsourcing content, you can have everything from interesting links to unique articles come to you, rather than relying on your own footwork to track them down.

One great way to start crowdsourcing content is to directly ask your followers what kinds of things they would like to see you share on your pages.  Then, you can focus your research on finding things that people will actually be interested in.  And you can take this idea a step further by asking your audience to bring content to you directly, cutting your research time down completely.

In order to encourage people to start bringing links to you, simply post on social media asking people to share their “favorite” content that relates to your restaurant.  An example question could be “what’s your favorite dish we serve?”  Once people answer, you can share a picture of the dish with a caption like “Thanks for the input!  Here’s your ‘favorite dish’ that we serve!”  You won’t have to think about what dishes may be interesting, or what to post, because your audience has already told you.  You can phrase questions asking for links, pictures, or other content, and then share that content with your followers to save yourself the research time.

3. Cross Post Appropriate Content

While cross posting can sometimes be a bad idea, there is certainly a “right way” to do it that can help you save time and keep your content fresh.  Instead of simply sharing posts directly between different accounts, think about ways that you can share the same content with a different spin.  Try posting things with a different caption on each network, or sharing a link on one profile and then on another later in the week.

One of the best ways to use cross posting is to share original content like pictures and blog posts on all of your networks.  If you take the time to take some beautiful original photos of your food, you should do everything you can to make sure that as many people as possible see them, and photos do well on every major social network.  As noted above, just make sure that you add original captions and try to put a unique spin on each posting that you share amongst multiple networks.  As long as you keep those considerations in mind, sharing great content across multiple networks can be an invaluable way to save some time as a busy restaurant owner.