5 ways Restaurants can get more out of Twitter

Dining at a restaurant is a very social experience. This is one of the reasons why restaurant marketing translates so well across Social Media. As Twitter is the most social of these platforms we’ve put together a list of 5 top tips you can easily incorporate into time spent on Twitter to aid your restaurant marketing efforts.

1. Build a Local Following

Twitters popularity has grown massively in the UK over the last few years and a quite striking statistic is that 97% of its audience are 18 and over. What does this mean for your restaurant? It means that there are hundreds, if not thousands of people from your target market on Twitter within a radius as little as 5 miles from your restaurant.

Twitters Advanced Search lets you pinpoint tweets around a certain postcode. Follower Wonk on the other hand allows you to search for users by the location stated in their bio. Combining the power of these two tools will quickly produce a list of local people you can then follow, proven to be the most effective way of building up a strong follower count.

2. Join the Local Conversation

Following hashtags of your local area, such as #leeds or #manchester keeps your restaurant in sync with the local buzz. In doing so you become aware of what is being said around you, creating perfect opportunities to partake in the conversation and create an otherwise unobtainable awareness for your restaurant.

Remember to incorporate these hashtags in some of your tweets too, especially when promoting an event or special night, as this enables a wider audience to pick up on the news.

3. Twitter Specific Offers

People within communities share news and items of interest amongst each other. As Twitter is very much its own community, there is a massive scope to make a large audience aware of an offer your restaurant is running in a short space of time.

Pay with a Tweet lets you create a special discount that is only attainable to the user once it has been shared with their follower base. This method allows your audience to do some of your marketing for you, whilst giving them an incentive to dine at your restaurant more often than they would have done otherwise.

4. Monitor Tweets

People tweet on a daily basis asking for ideas when it comes to looking for a new restaurant to try out. With simple keyword monitoring facilities that tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck provide for free, you will be alerted when anyone mentions your tracked keywords.

For example, a Birmingham based restaurant would want to know whenever a user mentioned ‘restaurants’ and ‘eating out’ in ‘Birmingham’. Tracking this means that when someone tweets “Where’s good to eat out in Birmingham?!” you’re the first to know about it. This is the perfect opportunity to introduce your restaurant and really sell it to someone whom you know is actively looking for a new establishment to dine at.

5. Stay Active

Probably the best piece of advice we can give you is to maintain an active presence on Twitter. We see restaurants everyday set up an account, follow 50 people, put out a few blatant self-promotion messages then never return.

This didn’t work for the first restaurant to join Twitter, so it definitely won’t work for yours. Maintaining a strong blend of outreach, engagement and monitoring creates the perfect recipe for your restaurants success on Twitter.

Remember to check back for the next post in our restuarant marketing ideas series.