Did you launch a restaurant page but don’t know what to post? Learn some content posting ideas to attract customers every day.
A problem that restaurant owners often run into when they create a Facebook page is coming up with ideas on what to post next after putting up a profile picture and a cover picture and posting pictures of the restaurant, food and various other things. They might ask about what kinds of posts are the ones that will make people follow their restaurants or even just to increase customer traffic.
In fact, these questions are not unusual. This is because the true skill of practically every restaurant owner is offering food services and not creating content or engaging in content marketing. However, if you are not skilled at creating content, does this mean that you should hire a content creator to regularly post on your page? Be patient. Today, MHA has some content creation ideas to share that even newbies can continuously post on their restaurant pages.
Restaurant Opening-Closing Hours
This one is very important. Many people focus on uploading attractive pictures of their restaurants and food but forget that restaurant opening and closing hours are equally important. Imagine customers visiting Facebook on their phones and viewing your restaurant’s posts with tags in various feeds. They are interested in the restaurant, but they don’t know when the restaurant opens or closes. Consequently, they might leave these posts and try to access the restaurant’s page or they might visit the “About” page to find out their information.
Doing that is a bit complicated, however, so, for early posts, you can directly post the opening and closing hours and days of your restaurant. It is an equally good idea to pose them along side pictures of various food items and short restaurant stories.
Dos: Try taking a picture of the sign that tells your restaurant’s operating hours and present it with your restaurant’s menu items along with some captioning to make your post more interesting.
Don’ts: Posting inaccurate operating hours such as by saying the restaurant closes on Mondays when it actually opens every day.
Recommendations
Psychologically speaking, we pay the most attention to the restaurant’s recommended menu items, often so much so that we are able to effectively tell stories about these menu items, and it is not just us. Customers also often ask about restaurant recommendations, and they feel like they need to order them when visiting certain restaurants. This then can lead to the customers inviting their friends to try them out or even invite reviewers to review the restaurant. So, the restaurant can post menu recommendations along with menu stories such as their concepts, their unique characteristics that make them stand apart from those in other restaurants, preparation methods, and even their prices.
Dos: Additionally study food photography such as from Professional Food Photography Using Mobile Phones , as great photography make your foods appear more appetizing and allows you to create photo albums for when you have a lot of items to recommend.
Don’ts: Simply posting pictures of your recommendations without sharing stories and details or explaining why they are recommended.
How to Contact the Restaurant or Make Reservations
Many people wonder why they should have to post about this, especially after they have already included restaurant contact details on their page. However, they should do so because posting on the feed about seat reservations has many psychological effects such as by encouraging customers to make their service decisions and by illustrating to customers the restaurant’s readiness to greet them and that customers only have to contact the restaurant through any of the convenient channels available for customer communication.
You can say it provides convenience from the get-go for making inquiries and reservations. Some restaurants might also post things to encourage customers to make decisions based on the psychology of “things running out” such as “We have a just a few seats left; you need to make a reservation now” or “This menu items is almost out, so make sure to order it” along side their contact and reservation posts.
Dos: Consider opening every contact channel convenient for the customer over the restaurant’s own convenience such as LINE OA, Messenger, telephone numbers and links for ordering deliveries through applications.
Don’ts: Leaving contact channels outdated or impossible to use, using canceled numbers, or entering wrong contact information, all of which are ways to lose revenue due to lost sales opportunities caused by failed customer contact.
If You’ve Launched a Page for Awhile And Now You Are “Stuck”
If you’re stuck and can’t come up with an idea on the content you should post, and you have already posted all the basic things such as your recommendations and restaurant details, it is possible is that your problem is that you don’t have a page content creation plan. For such cases, we recommend planning content creation by setting time periods and contents for different time periods as follows:
- Create a table of your contents divided into daily contents, weekly contents, and monthly contents.
- Try specifying the contents you will create for each time period with consideration to the difficulty in content creation. We would like to offer some interesting content examples for different days as follows:
Daily Contents – These should consist of still images or short video clips that you can record and edit yourself using your smart phone or should be written content that isn’t too long such as the following:
Monday – Restaurant menu – Consider posting menu pictures or daily recommendations menu with captions sharing stories about these menus to sell and invite customers to visit the restaurant.
Tuesday – Post the atmosphere inside the restaurant. True, you might have already done this when you launched your page. However, the atmosphere of your restaurant can change. Your decorations can be added all the time. For example, maybe add trees or figurines or place beverages and food at different angles in the restaurant. Keep changing your angles. You can even add some encouraging or thoughtful captions each day with a small amount aimed at generating sales.
Wednesday – If you’re tired of uploading food menu pictures, try posting pictures of food ingredients. For this part, you can create a wide variety of captions. For example, you can present the quality of the ingredients or demonstrate your readiness to serve customers. Otherwise, if you have special ingredients, you can present them alongside the special menu items prepared using these ingredients.
Thursday – Try posting pictures of your employees. Employees are also part of the restaurant’s services. If customers see pictures of employees who are prepared to offer services, the customers will recognize the employees’ eagerness and service mindedness through the posts. You can create many different kinds of posts. They can be posts of groups of restaurant employees, individual restaurant employees, greeters, cooks, etc. You can also post pictures of these employees in poses in which they are ready to serve. In addition, what do your chefs or cooks have to especially offer? (You can take their pictures alongside the food.)
Friday – For this day, you should try to boost sales somewhat by posting various promotions, especially if your restaurant is an evening dining restaurant. You should post various recommendations or even directly invite customers to eat and hangout at your restaurant. You can offer monthly promotions or other promotions based on the occasion. The pictures you upload should contain information about your promotions such as menu items or graphics highlighting your promotions along with details and exceptions to your promotions included in your captions. Also don’t forget to include contact telephone numbers or other restaurant contact information for making reservations or ordering food in these posts.
Saturday – To make things more interesting for the restaurant, maybe you can post additional pictures of your restaurant’s atmosphere when customers have filled the place. This is because pictures of customers using services at your restaurant guarantees the restaurant’s services. The more customers, the more interesting it will be. However, you shouldn’t post chaotic pictures. You should instead post pictures that are bright, warm and happy, whether in regards to the service provider or service recipients.
Sunday – If this day is the restaurant’s day off, maybe you can make a post stating that your restaurant will be closed. Otherwise, take this opportunity to thank your customers for the past week or to recommend monthly promotions. Also encourage customers to make decisions by stating that there is little time left to make their decisions. For long holidays when the restaurant will not be closed, you should invite customers who are not traveling in different provinces to eat at your restaurant. However, statistics show that you often get little engagement on Sundays, so you should find light content for posting on this day.
The example contents we recommended for the 7 days can be posted in alternation or in combination each day however appropriate. Otherwise, if you think the contents for each day are still too infrequent, you can also find additional content to provide such as pictures of customers receiving services (after you have already asked permission to take pictures and post them), pictures of parties by large groups of customers, pictures of VIP customers or celebrities, and real-time content such as encouragements for people struggling with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the restaurant’s response measures.
However, you should avoid risky things that might harm your image or might violate morals or laws or which might cause disunity such as political, religious, cultural or other opinions. Furthermore, when your restaurant’s page is reviewed, you can share that content on your page. You can even share small reviews customers gave on their pages.
Weekly Contents
They should still be still pictures or short videos that can be recorded and edited by your own smart phones. However, you can make your storytelling a bit longer than before. Here are some examples:
– You can talk about the history and background of the restaurant. If the restaurant has a long-established history, you can tell stories about previous generations leading up to the present. When customers see that a restaurant has survived continuously up to the present day, a sense of guarantee is provided in regards to the flavors and services offered by the restaurant.
– You can also use pictures or videos to tell stories about what it takes for great menu items to be made covering ingredient preparation, cooking, plate arrangement, presentation and serving. We recommend you use the VLOG format with an interview with or pictures of the chef from the beginning and then edit them using a software application.
– Try sharing small facts about food that you’ve researched such as history about coffee, interesting facts about herbs in food, the benefits of health juices, etc. These stories need to be connected to the foods served at your restaurant. Also don’t forget to present pictures of the dishes that you are posting stories about.
We recommend using each month’s special occasions to create promotions or for creating special content. For example, for Mother’s Day, you can offer a promotion with which mothers can eat at a discounted rate throughout August, or you can offer a healthy-foods promotion to welcome the cool season. You can do so by posting graphics announcing your promotions that capture the moods and tones of the occasions in each month. These can be pictures of the restaurant, menu pictures or other pictures related to the special occasions accompanied by detailed captions of your promotions.
If you have some video recording skills, we recommend creating short VLOGs that present all the foods and customer pictures over the past month. If you have video editing skills, you should try creating video content that presents the restaurant in unique angles to make your feed more outstanding.
There are lots of other contents that you can create and post on your page. This is because Facebook pages, in addition to being tools for generating sales, are also channels for communicating with your target groups. Therefore, in addition to sales oriented contents, you can use your page to communicate, contact or post various other contents to keep customers reading as part of a continuous content marketing strategy while maintaining closeness with your Facebook customers. You can study additional content creation concepts in 5 Concepts for Creating Captivating Content. Also don’t forget to follow the latest restaurant marketing articles on MHA’s website.
We would like to thank the following for page content pictures and examples:
- Pang Phra Nakhon
- Penguin Eat Shabu
- Palate Bar & Restaurant
- Copper Buffet
- Nuea Moo Daed Diao Tra E-Miao Peen Too Kap Kao
- Shichi Japanese Restaurant
- Burger King Thailand
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