How Often Should You Post on Social Media to Get More Online Orders?
As you build your online orders and general awareness for your restaurant, it’s important to establish a social media presence. Many times people may prefer a certain social media outlet over another, so it’s important to take advantage of all of them to reach the most people, but how do you know if you’re posting too much? Take a look at the guide below because the frequency of posts does depend on with network you’re using.
Most important things to consider about posting on social media:
What you’re posting.
First and foremost you need to pay attention to what you’re posting on social media. You want to add value to your customers’ experience. If you post about things that aren’t interesting or of poor picture quality, this will alienate people. This is the place to announce events for your restaurant or if something changes such as opening and closing times. This is a great place to announce food specials and new menu items. When you’re posting about food, make sure to include pictures or video. Images are a must when you’re promoting your restaurant and it will gain more attention than just words alone.
The time of day that you post.
You also want to take the time of day into consideration when making posts. You want to plan posts for just before and during meal times. This is the best time to catch someone and convince them to come into your restaurant. Hunger is a powerful motivator!
The frequency of posts.
For Facebook, the sweet spot for a business is once or twice per day and once on the weekend. This lends itself well to the restaurant industry as you can highlight one meal per day as well as another post about news or something else of interest to your customers. Three or more posts a day have found to be off-putting and lead to people unliking your business so they don’t see so many posts from the same place.
The lifespan on Twitter posts is shorter than on Facebook. It is only about two hours so you can post much more often than on Facebook. The sweet spot with Twitter is four to 15 posts per day. You will want to cover the time zones that you cater to, so your posts may be higher or lower within this range depending on your coverage. Most likely, you’ll probably be focusing on local customers so closer to four will be optimal. Because of the short lifespan, you can make multiple posts of the same content if you choose and it’ll still be effective.
The recommendation for LinkedIn is one post per day during the week. Since it’s a professional social network, many people don’t log into it during the weekend anyway, so it’s more beneficial to just make sure you post during the workweek. For LinkedIn, you want to avoid making too many promotional posts because it is against the very nature of the site. For best results, you should be sharing industry information and news about your restaurant.
Google+
There aren’t set recommendations for Google+ yet, but many businesses have found that posting between once and four times per day during the workweek will yield the best results. Make sure to pay attention to your analytics with Google+ as this will be the best gauge on the frequency of posts. It relies heavily on your audience.
Stick to seven or less posts on Instagram during the week. The unspoken rule with Instagram seems to be that you only post once a day and that seems to be the norm.
Pinterest is very high volume so you want to post four to 10 times per day to get the best results. This is a great place to showcase photos of your food. Make sure the images are of high quality and it’s also best to use vertical photos. These will have higher engagement because they take up the most amount of the screen.
YouTube
YouTube is a great place to showcase videos of interviews with your cooks or customers. They are time consuming, but make sure to upload a couple new videos each month and promote them through your other social media pages to drive traffic to your videos.
By taking advantage of multiple social media networks in the right way, you’ll reach the most people. When you also make sure to make posts of value, this will help lead to your restaurant’s success. Social media is a must for all businesses so make sure you put in the work to get the most out of it.