By Jessica Fender, Contributor

You may think that the quality of food is the only thing that people take into consideration to decide whether a restaurant is trustworthy or not. However, it’s not entirely true.

Research has shown that diners are also heavily influenced by a restaurant’s social media content. Here’s what a survey posted by QSR has reported on this matter:

45% of U.S. diners visited a restaurant for the first time after seeing its social media content
22% said that a restaurant’s content enticed them to return
13% of respondents said that a restaurant’s social media content had discouraged them from returning

As you can see, it’s hard to underestimate the impact of a restaurant’s social media activity on its visitors. Social platforms also supply people with social proof since they can read comments from the regular diners and decide whether this is a trustworthy place to visit.

So, if a restaurant’s social media content impacts the diners so much, how can you excel at it?

We will attempt to answer this question as we discuss how to write engaging restaurant social media content.

1. Show Off Your Menu

The first piece of content that impacts the customer’s experience with your restaurant is your menu. Your dishes are the feature that makes your restaurant stand out, and your social media content should highlight that.

So, enrich your social media strategy with the content that presents your signature dishes. For inspiration, take a look at how Savoy Grill, one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, showcases his famous Beef Wellington:

The post is dedicated to Christmas, as this dish is a Christmas classic, and encourages the visitors to order Gordon Ramsay’s signature dish and add it to their holiday menu.

How to write the content that successfully presents your top menu items?

Highlight the name of the dish. Your goal is to make it stick in the consumer’s memory.
Add adjectives that describe the dish. The description of a dish should create relevant associations.
Mention who will enjoy this dish. Use your content to describe the target audience for this dish. This information can be useful for people with dietary restrictions.

On top of that, don’t forget to add a visual depicting the menu item – it should represent the dish as it is and set realistic expectations.

2. Show Behind-the-Scenes

People love getting a sneak peek of a restaurant’s behind-the-scenes. It helps them learn more about the restaurant, how it works and how the dishes get cooked. Besides, behind-the-scenes content humanizes a restaurant as a brand, bringing it closer to its guests.

Also, behind-the-scenes content creates an opportunity for a potential customer to take a look at the restaurant’s kitchen, which can be an indicator of the restaurant’s quality of dishes. Plane Food, one more of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, often shows its kitchen in the behind-the-scenes content:

In the example above, Gordon Ramsay introduces the restaurant’s chef and talks a bit about creating the restaurant’s signature dish – butter chicken. There are also a few other behind-the-scenes moments that show how other popular dishes are prepared.

How to write the behind-the-scenes content that attracts more customers?

Make sure your content showcases your restaurant’s individuality. Use this content to help your restaurant stand out by showing off some of its unique features.
Write content that’s raw and realistic. Don’t overuse embellishments and pompous language. Keep it simple.
Use storytelling. Turn your behind-the-scenes content into a story to tell about the qualities that shape your restaurant as a brand.

The more you are willing to share exclusive, never-before-seen details with your followers on social media, the more engagement you will receive. People love when brands have nothing to hide, especially if it’s a restaurant that needs to be honest and upfront about its daily activities.

3. Write About Your Restaurant Team

A variant of the behind-the-scenes content is the coverage of your team’s everyday life. This content deserves its own section in this article because of the significant impact of employee recognition on your restaurant’s online image.

Think about it – if a restaurant mistreats its employees and tries to hide the details of their day-to-day work life, it doesn’t do any good to its reputation. We live in an age when it’s very hard to hide the truth. And, if a restaurant is not a good place for work, its employees will eventually let the world know about it on websites like Indeed or even via Google Reviews.

On top of that, expressing employee recognition by showing your team can help you get more customers. Statistics have proven that employee recognition can increase a positive impact on a brand’s profits by at least 36%, apart from making your restaurant seem more trustworthy in general.

You can post employee recognition content regularly or dedicate it to a certain event. For example, The Melt, a burger and grill restaurant, featured its employees in a Thanksgiving post:

You can also tell more about each employee that’s working in your restaurant, their responsibilities, and unique background. This way, you also have a chance to showcase your team’s diversity, which can have a positive impact on your restaurant’s online image.

4. Create Recurring Content Series

One more idea, how you can spice up your social media content and make it more engaging is creating a recurring content series. It can be an especially good idea if your restaurant specializes in different varieties of one dish or is focused on a particular cuisine.

Modern Market Eatery is a great example of a recurring content series strategy. Every Tuesday, the restaurant posts different types of bowls under the hashtag #bowltuesday, with weekly lucrative offers and discounts:

Also, every week follows a unique theme, and customers can get unique chef’s specials that are only available for a limited time.

How to make an engaging content series for your restaurants?

First and foremost, such content requires its own budget. Since it will be repeating regularly on your social media, it would make sense to invest in custom writing services and ask someone to do the visuals for you to ensure that this content always arrives on time.

There are also a few essentials to follow if you decide to create a recurring content series:

Pick one theme. It should represent one of your restaurant’s signature features – a dish, an event, etc.
Stick to the same format and style. This format should highlight the content from the recurring series and make it stand out.
Use a hashtag. A hashtag will allow your audience to easily check all the content from the series.

You can also ask your audience for some content suggestions and inspiration or even feature user-generated content in your recurring series, which will have a very positive effect on the engagement rates.

5. Spice Up Your Text with Memes

By now, you already know that written content on social media can’t perform well without some visuals. All the examples we’ve shared today show how both written and visual content can work in tandem to help build up your restaurant’s online presence.

But what if you don’t have visual content or can’t create it at the moment?

Then, it’s always a great solution to use memes that are currently popular online. Besides diversifying your social media content, memes have other engagement benefits:

You get more attention from the younger generations. For instance, using memes is a great way to attract Millennials to your restaurant who are always familiar with the latest online trends.
Memes can make your restaurant more noticeable. Featuring a meme can boost content shares and bring more attention from potential customers.
Memes help express your brand’s personality. Using memes once in a while can help you bring your restaurant forward and show your good sense of humor.

McDonald’s has a great example of using meme in its Facebook content:

The post is about sharing the McDonald’s meal with friends over an online video chat because it’s the only option during the pandemic. To intensify the sadness of this event, McDonald’s used the famous meme featuring hide-your-pain Harold but made a custom background.

As you can see, memes can help you get even more created with your social media content. However, the memes that you use should be relevant and neutral. Avoid adding controversial content that might confuse people and bring you bad publicity.

Wrapping Up

There is no doubt that social media content can make or break your restaurant’s reputation. Guests will always take an interest in your social media activity and will use it to determine whether they can trust you.

So, it is crucial to invest in eye-catching and engaging social media content for your restaurant. Let’s recap how you can do it:

Show off your menu. Write about your most popular and mouth-watering dishes to encourage more customers to visit your restaurant.
Give a sneak peek at the behind-the-scenes routine. Tell more about how your restaurant functions and how your signature dishes are created.
Recognize the input of your team. From time to time, tell a story of your restaurant employees and how each of them contributes to creating the dining experience.
Invest in recurring content series. Such content can help your restaurant stand out from the crowd.
Make use of memes. Finally, show off your amazing sense of humor and stay in-trend with the most popular internet memes.

Hopefully, our suggestions will help you transform your restaurant’s social media content strategy and make it more engaging.

About the Author
Jessica Fender is a copywriter and blogger at GetGoodGrade with a background in marketing and sales. She enjoys sharing her experience with like-minded professionals who aim to provide customers with high-quality services.

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