With over 350 million users world wide by now Facebook is the most popular social media site in the world. All of my friends are on Facebook. Most of my communications from email and phone have migrated to Facebook. We all hangout on Facebook to share information and updates about our personal lives. Over 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day as per the last stats on over all time spent on Facebook. Facebook has become a cyber destination for people to get updated with their friends and families. Now what does this all mean to your restaurant?
Facebook in a way is blessing to small restaurants like yours. It offers a huge opportunity to market your restaurant for FREE except it requires little bit of your social time. It has leveled the field plain in regards to marketing.It means that no more can a BIG company win just because they have more money than you. The game of marketing today, in an age of social media is dictated not just by the amount of dollars one can throw at mass media company rather by creative ideas and innovation. In fact if you are smart and learn the ins and out of social media marketing you can outsmart the BIG brands who may try to outspend in the hope to crush you.
Some times it makes me think if at all now you need a traditional static website where there is no way of communicating with your customers directly as you can do on Facebook. Knowing how busy you are in your restaurants I don’t expect you to learn html for just creating website which sits idle in a cyberspace. However,I’d not hesitate to recommend a blog for you restaurant knowing how well it get indexed on blogs and can help your restaurant to be organically found on search engine like Google. I would recommend only if you have time and extra money to invest so you can post menus updates, recipe, any customers’ experiences or anything relevant to your restaurant. But if you think you don’t have that much time, you can start of your online presence by creating your personal profile and also Fan Page of your restaurant on Facebook. I believe if you just do this for now, you would be far ahead than other restaurants who are scratching their head to figure out this social media jungle. My recommendation is that you start the journey of social media marketing step by step. First Facebook, then Twitter, then may be blog and so on…. The key is to master on one and migrate to another. That way you are maximizing your result for the time you input. You don’t want to be in a situation where you are spread out thin in millions of social media sites, loosing the focus and getting no results at all.
Now that we know that Facebook can be helpful for small businesses like restaurants, the question is how can you leverage Facebook to attract more customers into your restaurant and potentially make more money for your restaurant?
Check out the video above created by “Your Business Channel” that shares the Facebook marketing strategies for businesses. However I have incorporated the strategies along with some other additional relevant ideas that is related to restaurant business.
Below are the four Facebook marketing strategies that you can implement for your restaurant.
- Get lots of friends-(Magic number is 5000)
- Create a Fan Page and use branded customized application
- Publish interesting contents
- Look for right partners
1.Get lots of friends
I hope you have already created your personal profile by signing up at facebook. If not I would highly recommend you to create one right now at http://www.facebook.com/ It will take you less than 10 minutes and it is FREE.Now the key is to request friends to your list and the magic number is 5000. You goal is to get that 5000 friends in your friend list. Now you are not going to request all in one time. But you can start by requesting 10 or 15 friends per day or whatever you think is appropriate in your situation. But I want to WARN you not to over do it. Facebook won’t like it and it will alert them as if you are spamming and won’t allow you to request any more friends. So go easy on that. Another important thing to keep in mind is to request friends by qualifying them focusing more on quality rather than quantity. What I mean is that you want to friend those people who might be your potential customers. To begin with you could simply ask to your current customers that come to your restaurant. Most of them are already on Facebook. Once you become friends with them. Look into their friend list. Local friends have local friends on their friends list. Chances are that they might have categorized as local friends or real friends or something like that. You could just request friends by just writing a small friendly note. It is like meeting friends of your close buddy at a party and introducing to yourself. If you do it correctly, chances are most of them will accept to be friends with you especially when you mention the friend’s name with personal note of yours. If you feel uncomfortable then there is feature where Facebook will automatically suggest you friends based on your friends social networks. It is doing pretty much the same thing except now the computer robots are doing the recommending. Facebook is acting as a friend who is trying to introduce you to a friend of a friend. So my logic is if Facebook is doing why not you do it more proactively and gain more friends faster. After all we join social network sites like Facebook to make more friends some known and some unknown.
Alternatively you could also look into foodie group that is created on Facebook in your city.You can participate on some of those group that you like and make some friends there too. Imagine if you had 5000 friends that were potential customers of your restaurant. That means you have an access to your friends/customers at a click of mouse or touch of an update on your smart phone. You will never have to be at the mercy of those newspaper, radio or TV execs. No more will they control the marketing message of your restaurant. You will control the message yourself. Most importantly with out having to pay that hefty advertising fee and that never seems to work for your restaurant.
2. Create a Fan Page and use branded customized application
Once you create your own personal profile page on Facebook and get bunch of friends to start off, you can start building your fan page using branded customized application. If you haven’t yet created the fan page of your restaurant, here is the link on how to create a Facebook Fan Page for your restaurant.Though some of the big brands have made their own customized application from scratch costing them several thousands of dollars, you as a small restaurant with tight budgets, it might not be worth your money. However you can use other Facebook application built by other app developers by paying tiny subscription fees. This way you don’t have to invest a lot in one single app.Rather you have a chance to try several other apps that might fit to your restaurant needs. Some of the popular Facebook app providers are Involver, WildFire, Sprout Publisher . I would recommend you to choose some apps that would enhance your user’s experience on fan page. Your users are the fans of your restaurant. The key thing is that the app should make your fan page so attractive that it should make them come back again and again to the Fan Page. May be you could use app to distribute the coupons. May be update your tweets if your restaurant has twitter presence, or update your blog post. (I’m suggesting this if you are already on twitter or blogging)
3. Publish interesting contents
Update your Facebook Fan page at least once a day. Though there is no set rules on how many times a day you can update your fan page, the frequency is important with the relevancy of your updates. The best scenario would be 2 times a day. One right before lunch at around 11am and the other before dinner time say at around 5-6 o’ clock. These time slots are important because those are the times when people tend to check their Facebook right before they leave their office.You have two objective here by choosing this time. Your restaurant has a chance to get exposed to the most number of people by sharing whatever information you are trying to get in front of them. Secondly even if you were just sharing a general info lets say a great article on NY times about healthy living, you are indirectly reminding them about your restaurant. It is an indirect sell. You do not appear pushy rather informative and yet very subtle at selling your brand. May be that simple informative update will remind that person to get the dinner that his wife might have requested him for but he had forgotten it. You also may decide some other times as needs arise. It is totally up to you and try at different times just to test and see the results for yourself.
You should decorate your fan page with beautiful looking photos of signature dishes from your menu or some funny videos of some of your employees or yourself if you have one. It just makes the fan page more interactive. Fans tend to enjoy them since they have more visual effect. They seem to be more connected when they can see a chef showing his ninja style acrobatic skills. When customers see a funny video of a server who served them, they feel the sense of belonging to that group. Even for fans who have never visited the restaurant it would create a kind of bonding with your restaurant. It would create an image of cool restaurant in the mind of any fans that would come and see all those funny videos.While making the facebook update don’t be too structured and appear too corporate. Fans on Facebook are like friends so present to them casually as you would with friends. May be sometime creating jokes or being sensational like of tabloids. Do something different and unique and never be boring.
4. Look for right partners
You should work with others who have the same target customers like yours. You can just go around in your neighborhood and locate some other businesses in different market. Let’s say there is a health club. You could make friends with these business owners first. Chances are that they might have also built their fan base on Facebook. You could make a friendly business deal to promote each others business on Facebook. Wherever appropriate you could refer respective product to each others database of customers. When you are doing a joint marketing that would compliment each others business, both of you could also share the marketing cost. This way you could do grand marketing with less marketing expense to bear and yet impacting all the businesses involved in the marketing campaign. This joint marketing campaign can go beyond 2 businesses to any number of businesses. The more businesses you have participating the better it is.This is more effective when all the businesses decide to do offline marketing that is integrated with the online marketing that could be on Facebook.
Hope these ideas will help you get started to effectively market your restaurant on Facebook attracting tons of fans and hopefully turning them into loyal customers of your restaurant for years to come.Please share this with your friends who might benefit from these strategies. I would also appreciate if you could drop some comments on what you think about the above Facebook strategies and add some more ideas if you have that would help restaurants use Facebook more effectively.Thanks.