Cafes and restaurants on Instagram and Facebook

Most of the hospitality industry is dependent on physical presence. Despite the digitalization of local businesses, people prefer to sit in a cafe, restaurant, or bar and enjoy food and drinks with other people. This does not mean, however, that a restauranteur should side-line the Internet. In addition to an own website and an entry on Google, social media, especially Facebook and Instagram, play a major role in business – because you reach people where they are active already.

The corona pandemic has also severely affected the restaurant industry. Lockdowns, distancing rules, and limits on the number of guests have forced many cafe and restaurant owners to find creative solutions. Take-away and delivery services help pick up some of the lost sales. You might have seen a more diverse menu or clever outdoor seating arrangements. Social media plays a major role in this. If you want to draw attention to your business, Instagram and Facebook are the right places. In addition, social commerce features on social media can also help increase sales.

Many companies already have their own presence on Facebook and Instagram. In most cases, the business profiles are used to serve as a point of contact for those looking for the business. Restaurants and cafes can also make good use of this user behavior, and by having a social media presence, customers can follow your business and get in touch.

This way, visitors have the most important information at a glance. Instagram, on the other hand, offers far fewer possibilities for these kinds of details. Here, you’ll only get a short bio for your company. The biography should therefore be used for the most important information and include a link to the homepage of the restaurant or cafe.

Hospitality business owners can also share information very quickly and easily via social media. A post can be created in a few seconds and shared with all your followers. You can inform lots of customers about your news in a very short time. Whether a new menu, changed opening hours, or special events, all these things can be shared via Facebook and Instagram.

Those who want to share more text-based information will do well with Facebook. Longer texts can also be published on this platform. Nevertheless, attaching a picture to detailed texts helps a lot, as this will attract more attention from online customers.

Instagram, on the other hand, is the perfect place to present colorful pictures of your food. Photos of delicious meals, baked goods, or elaborate cocktails are very popular on this platform anyway. If users like the pictures, they may also follow the profile and consider paying a visit or making an order.

If you would like to share more information on Instagram, you can place the extra information as a caption to the picture. You can avoid this getting overlooked by including text in the pictures you post. The space is limited, but at least you can present your information well!

Moreover, communication in social media should not be a one-way street. Users have the opportunity to interact with you through comments under posts or via direct messages. As a restaurant or cafe, it’s worthwhile to respond to feedback and questions in order to strengthen customer loyalty.

Gastronomic enterprises can also use their presence on Facebook and Instagram to show off a certain ambience, style, or company philosophy. This is possible both in the way texts are written and in the choice of images that are posted. The tone of a written text – for example, how humorous the texts are – also gives readers a good impression of the atmosphere on site.

Pictures are perhaps even more important. How you present yourself on social media is how you are initially perceived. Whether the food, the premises, or the team, customers will enjoy seeing photos (and possibly also videos) to get an idea in advance of what to expect.

Corporations and large companies attach great importance to corporate identity. Corporate identity will always be a deciding factor when it comes to design. Small restaurants and cafes do not necessarily have to go to this effort, but it can make sense to have a uniform appearance on different media channels. This also applies to Facebook and Instagram – both in the design of the profile and in the posts.

Both Facebook and Instagram now have special functions that are designed to boost sales. Fashion labels and tech manufacturers in particular have already made use of these features. But cafes and particularly restaurants can also use Facebook and Instagram to boost sales.

To create a store on Instagram, you first need access to the Business Manager in Facebook. Then the product catalog can be created via the Catalog Manager. After the profile has been checked, your product range can be transferred to an Instagram store.

Once the order has been completed, it will either be brought by an external delivery service or driven directly to the customer’s home by the restaurant’s own service. The click & collect method for restaurants is becoming increasingly popular. Here, the customer orders their meal and then picks it up in the restaurant. This saves the restaurant or the customer delivery costs. Most customers pay when ordering, so you don’t risk making food without people collecting and paying for it.

Restaurants and cafe owners have various options at their disposal as to how their food or drinks can be delivered:

• Own delivery service: It may be worthwhile to carry out the deliveries yourself or to ask your own staff. This way, you’re not dependent on another service provider.
• External delivery service: On the other hand, there are several service providers who can take over the delivery for you. They pick up the order and then deliver it to the customer.
• Click & collect: With this method, customers pick up their order themselves, saving themselves or the restaurant the delivery charges.

All these possibilities can be easily put into place by using appropriate links on Facebook and Instagram.

With paid ads on Facebook or Instagram, you can draw even more attention to your restaurant or cafe. While you can hope to go viral, you shouldn’t count on it either. A safer option that is also easier to control is to set up ads in social networks, with a strategy called social media advertising.

Because Facebook and Instagram have a lot of information about their users (e.g., approximate location or specific interests), ads can be targeted very accurately to the right audience. There are also special categories for restaurants and cafes that make targeting easier. Not only the target group, but also their budget can be precisely understood. When creating the ad, you specify how much the daily budget would be. At the same time, the platform will provide information about an approximate range. This way, you can estimate how successful your ads will be with the given budget. The campaign then runs for one week, unless you change it.

Since Facebook and Instagram are part of the same media group, ads can also be distributed across both platforms. In fact, it is required that Instagram ads have a linked Facebook profile. Only then will it be possible to use the various advertising functions within Instagram. This can be really useful because business owners can increase the reach of individual posts or place ads in the stories via Instagram.

For restaurants and cafes, as for most companies, sales and profits will be the deciding factor as to whether social media will continue to be a good sales method. However, financial success rarely happens overnight and your activity on social media might take a while to get noticed – but it won’t be in vain. As with many advertising measures, social media marketing is a long-term success strategy, and not about instant results. Whether this will be achieved can be analyzed with particular features of social media platforms, which we will now look at.

Followers (sometimes also called “fans”) are the people who follow a channel or profile. In other words, users will have activated a form of subscription, in a sense, and get any new posts from the company displayed on their feeds. This helps reach an audience directly and quickly. Since this gives you a relatively secure following, you should keep an eye on the number of followers. If the number of followers drops significantly, adjusting your strategy may be wise.

Social media posts can also be seen by people who do not actively follow your profile. For example, users can see posts because they are shared by other members on the social platform. This is called organic reach. This is a great indication of how well your content is being received.

In addition, there is also a reach that is created by advertising. For a fee, the platforms promote these posts to a specific target group. These two forms of reach can only be compared to a limited extent.

Facebook and Instagram are not one-way streets; information isn’t just posted from one side. In the best-case scenario, users on social media also interact and communicate with companies. Interactions can take the form of comments, but liking and sharing posts are also part of the engagement rate. Anyone who interacts with a post has also, most likely, taken note of it. Therefore, the number of these kinds of interactions is probably even the most important indicator for how well your company is doing on social media.