Management of Social Networks in restaurants and hotels: first steps
Hospitality marketing
Cooking Europe. Tilburg, July 3rd 2022.
One of the most powerful channels of communication in any hospitality business are social networks.
They are the perfect channel to be in contact with our customers, to show them who we are, to show them our news and to interact with them.
Many clients and potential clients can make the decision to go to one place or another depending on what they see on their social networks. It is a fact, we must use social networks for our hospitality business.
The challenge that any bar, restaurant or cafeteria will always have is the strategy that it must follow to manage its channels.
Many businesses, to save costs, run their own social networks. Effectively they save costs but in reality they are giving shots in the air without knowing what they should do (unless they have knowledge in digital marketing for restaurants).
Just as it is necessary to have a beverage supplier, as many product suppliers and an accountant, the marketing and communication of our business can only be managed professionally.
A common problem is that many owners believe they know about social networks because they themselves use them in their private lives and believe that they should be managed in the same way. Mistake, serious mistake! This is the same as thinking that by exercising we can be coaches, or by giving advice to our friends we can be psychologists.
With our experience as Food & Beverage consultants and marketing experts for hotels and restaurants, we are going to mark a route for you from scratch so that you know what to do with your social networks (even if you have a low budget).
One of the firsts steps is to know what social networks our customers are on. Most will be on Facebook and Instagram but they are not the only ones. There are more social media channels (and new ones will continue to appear). To find out, either we do a market study on our own or we ask a marketing agency that will know the market trends.
Then you have to reserve the usernames, very important to have an easy recognize of your brand! You must choose the closest and most similar username to our business and use that same name in ALL our channels. We cannot call each other on Facebook in one way and on Twitter in another.
Answer the following
From here, before starting we have to develop the strategy of our channels and for this we have to answer the following questions:
Which tone/language are we going to use in communication?
What are going to be the colors and designs that are going to define our business in social networks?
Wich type of audiovisual content are we going to generate (photos, videos, reels, stories…)?
What kind of content are we going to publish and why? At this point it is important to stop and think, what is our audience interested in seeing?
How will be the publication schedule? It does not have to be written every day of the year, but a forecast of seasons and important dates that are related to our business.
What are the most important hashtags for our business?
How will they be managed and who will be in charge of publishing, responding to messages, redirecting the strategy, reviewing statistics, etc…?
Answering these basic questions we have the first step to start working on our social networks.
We do not recommend starting to use our social networks in our restaurant, cafeteria or bar without first being clear about these points.
*Tip: It´s better that the first 6 – 9 months a marketing agency or a consulting company specialized in F&B that is in charge of building the bases of our social networks. It is one of the best investments we can make in our hospitality business. You have to be advised by professionals because although anyone can make a publication, not everyone knows how to make social networks generate sales.
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