Grow Your Community on Social Media

You might have heard the term ‘social community’ being thrown around a lot when reading about social media management. Anyone or any brand can have a presence on social media, but there is a clear difference between those that manage to create a community and those that don’t. A social community is a group of engaged fans/followers who really want to receive your content as part of their personalised social experience. As well as an interest in your restaurant itself, they could also be ‘foodies’ who want to see content around wider topics. They are also likely to be part of the local community.

Incentives for Customers to ‘check-in’ on Facebook

If you use Facebook you might have seen your friends and family checking in at different locations. You yourself might have checked-in, at the airport, at a gig but more commonly, at a restaurant! Everybody loves good food and service, so when they get this, it’s only natural to want to share it with the world. However, many Facebookers might not think to check-in when they’re visiting your restaurant, that’s why an incentive can be a good way to increase numbers.

For example, when the bill is given to the customer, you could also hand them a small card that offers them a free drink on their next visit when they check-in and ‘like’ your page on Facebook. If the customer presents this to their waiter/waitress before they leave you can reward them with a coupon.

Another method would be to offer a free meal for two, allowing everyone who checks-in online to receive an entry into the prize draw. There are many ways you can get creative with this, so don’t be afraid to think outside the box and do something no-one else is doing!

Run Giveaways & Competitions

Once you’ve started to acquire a small fanbase on your social channels, it can be really beneficial to run a giveaway campaign. This typically creates variations of these three things:

• It spreads brand awareness
• It can be used to collect user-generated content
• It creates more customers

For example, you could give away a coupon for a ‘buy one get one free’ meal. This might attract new customers who otherwise wouldn’t have considered visiting so soon.

You could ask existing customers to send in their best photos at your restaurant as part of their entry. This would give you a collection of new photos to use in future marketing and it will also be seen by new customers.

Start a Unique Hashtag

Start your own hashtag and encourage customers to get tweeting! You can really go to town with this, have your hashtag on your menu’s, on your serviettes and up on the walls. Try integrating the hashtag with giveaways or other special offers.

Rub smokehouse is a restaurant that does this very well. They integrated #rubyourselfie & told their customers to use this tag when tweeting photos from their visit. The result? Lots of discussion and engagement through this platform.

Be Reactive & Post Regularly

Growing your social community is all about nurturing those interactions. If someone mentions your food or service make sure you reply to them. Even if that person hasn’t tweeted you directly, it’s great to acknowledge what others are saying about your brand. Keep your social media presence going, post regularly; every day if you have the resources. If you start tweeting every day and then you go quiet for a couple of weeks, it doesn’t look good. Social media is something that needs to be maintained.

As well as this, try to be reactive to new trends. Whether that’s a newly released social media feature or the latest topic to trend on Twitter. Get in there first and get noticed.