By Seshu Madabushi

Twitter has effectively been restaurant’s micro-blogging friend for a decade and has changed the face of marketing. It’s a great marketing tool and you can easily convert a 140-letter copy into an effective and succinct sales pitch. Here’s how...

1) Profile Set Up

Your profile picture and bio are essential info that will describe your restaurant’s brand and will stick by every tweet you send out. Make sure you incorporate appropriate business info, hours, menu link and a personalized logo.

2) Use Lists

A restaurant needs to engage with a myriad of organizations. For example, a restaurant may interact with bloggers for promotional activities, keep an eye out for competitors to stay on top of the game, and look for new vendors etc. You can now make up to 1,000 lists and each list can include up to 5,000 accounts.

3) Be Selective on Who You Follow

Being selective so your Twitter timeline isn’t clogged. You wouldn’t want all the noise to drown out the tweets and interactions that actually matter. It is advisable to have the automatically follow feature turned off. You may even take the help of tools like Audiense, Twitter Analytics, FollowerWonk etc.

4) Generate Content with Twitter Moments

Twitter’s newly launched storytelling feature is also a great way to optimize engagement on your account. Twitter Moments is a content curation tool that allows you to gather and share a collection of tweets about a specific topic. This can be used in case you want to market an event.

5) Switch on Your DMs

Direct messaging (DM) is often disabled by default, so make sure this feature is enabled. These are the private messages sent to you by followers and you need to be accessible to people that wish to reach out.

6) Give Twitter Advertising a Try

Twitter marketing enables you to customize your ad to deliver to the people who matter the most to your business. Target followers of similar accounts through Twitter ads and capture the exact clientele. Ads also give you the option to search according to relevant hash tags and target previous customers, using your existing customer database.

7) Jump into Trending Topics

Hopping in on the trending Twitter topic yields multifold benefits. Some of these topics are sudden events; some of these can be planned well in advance. These heavily trafficked and heavily searched trending topics can open your brand to a wide gamut of new audience.

8) Utilize the Effective Sales Platform

Twitter is a platform well equipped to increase your restaurant sales – online as well as in store.

Coupon-based marketing comes with a myriad of benefits.

i) It is just exclusive to Twitter followers, which is a great way to reward them and hence, you can measure how your brand is performing on Twitter.

ii) It helps in increasing visibility and brand loyalty. Adding a few staples to it such as like, follow and retweet can multiply your audience.

9) The Latest Customer Service Tool

The last two years have seen a 2.5x increase in customer service conversations on Twitter. Immediate responses along with a solution will go a long way into showing you are a restaurant that cares.

10) Engage as Much as You Can

Twitter engagements work on the 80/20 rule: 80% interaction, 20% about yourself. Sending personalized messages to your customers, reviewing their opinions and criticism, and keeping a track of your followers will go a long way. Take the help of some apps that can help you better manage your followers, interactions, etc. This is especially appropriate if you are a 24-hour business.

11) Find Your Influencers

Apart from the followers, look out for the key influencers to follow. See what type of content they are sharing to get new follows, likes and retweets. Klout is an imperative tool that helps in identifying the most influential Twitter users. Be sure to acknowledge them if they do share your content. A single share from an influencer can put you on the map!

12) Bring Out Some Cool Pics

Statistics show tweets with photos/videos get wider reach than plain content. Retweet percentage for such tweets increase by 150% and the number of clicks increase by 18%, approximately. These pictures/videos don’t necessarily have to be of professionally-shot quality. You’re good even if you’re snapping away through your smartphone.

13) Keep Track

Going through the tweets of target audience will give you an insight into the pool of possibilities you should be tapping. Use Twitter Analytics to measure the visibility and engagement of your tweets. Use these analytics to understand what type of content is being preferred by your audience and make more of those.

Adopt these simple tips and tricks and get loved by Tweeples out there.

About the Author:
Seshu Madabushi is the ‎Founder & CEO of mKonnekt. He has more than 15 years of experience working for Fortune 50 clients to mom-and-pop stores and also have worked on multiple startups. mKonnekt creates a marketing platform that mines customer data to create personalized dining experiences. The platform consists of different modules that includes online ordering system (FoodKonnekt), loyalty program (FreeKwent) etc. The intent is to capture customer data as they interact with restaurants and use this data to better market restaurants.