Take Your Restaurant Social Series: Twitter

Welcome to part 2 of our Take Your Restaurant Social Series, this time we’ll be jumping into the land of 160 characters or less; Twitter!

This series is for small businesses, new restaurants that don’t have the resources to spend thousands on a professional marketing campaign. Every strategy we list and share are things that you can do yourself with a bit of time and effort.

Use the links below to quickly navigate to the medium you’re interested in;

Part 1 – Facebook
Part 2 – Twitter
Part 3 – SMS/Mobile
Part 4 – Geo-Social

Twitter Marketing Strategies for Restaurants

1. Be a human being. On Twitter, perhaps more than any other social network, it’s easy to fall into the habit of posting only mundane boring tweets, i.e. your specials for the day. Do your best not to fall into this habit, Twitter users are pretty unique and they appreciate personal attention, so take an extra 5 minutes every other day and think of something unique to say or share.

2. Learn the lingo, asap. Use this. You don’t need to memorize everything in there but it’ll help get you up to speed quickly.

3. Follow liberally. The more people you follow the more followers you’ll get. However, maximize your efforts here by finding local people to follow. You could do this by looking up users by location or find another popular local business and check out their followers.

4. Cross promote on your social networks but don’t link accounts. I cringe every time I see a Facebook page linked to a Twitter account and vice versa. Don’t think that this is a smart strategy to save time, it’s a big turn off to a lot of users. If you want the benefits of being on two social networks, you’d better be prepared to use them both.

5. Have a nice Twitter avatar made (your profile picture on Twitter). 99% of the time it will be seen as a small 50px x 50px image. Make it easy and clear to associate with your restaurant.

6. Encourage feedback from followers, ask for opinions every now and then, retweet compliments liberally and follow up carefully on complaints.

7. Ask for reviews and include a link to your Yelp or Facebook review pages. Offering a small incentive always helps and could be well worth your while. Social reviews are huge and only getting bigger.

8. Especially applicable to bars/clubs, have live Twitter giveaways! Announce to your patrons that you’re having a live Twitter giveaway in 10 minutes, then follow with some small task, like retweeting a tweet of yours. Twitter is pretty commonly used on mobile devices, take advantage of this aspect. Only people at the bar/club can win, and give away something small like a $5 gift certificate or a t-shirt. People eat these things up and it’ll get you exposure to their followers.

9. Don’t spam. 4 or 5 tweets in an hour is fine, more than 10 is pushing it. Replying to tweets doesn’t count towards this number because it’ll only be seen by people that follow both you and the person you’re replying to.

10. Talk about things other than your restaurant. Be careful if you touch upon politics or religion, for the obvious reasons. But remember one of your goals should be to be a human on there and humans have opinions and random thoughts, share them!

About the Author

Neil DuPaul is a Marketing Associate at Speedy Incorporation. He also enjoys the entrepreneurial lifestyle as a freelance web designer and SEO for local businesses. You can catch up and connect with him on twitter.