Karan Dholakia, Social Media Content Producer and Videographer provides practical advice and tips on marketing your healthy dishes and foodservice business on social media.
Christine and Karan discuss some of the ways to market on social media through practical, simple, and ethical methods.
Light Transcript of Interview
C: My first question for you is, why should restaurants use social media, why not just have a website?
K: It’s interesting, we live in an age now where social media has become almost the norm of our daily lives; not just our offline lives but our jobs as well. We’re surrounded by it down to the companies that we work at. Focusing on restaurants specifically, 59% of chain restaurants and 79% of independent restaurants use social media. It totally depends on your business but there is merit in having a social media profile, regardless of which platform it is, whether it’s Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, there is a guaranteed audience for you. I think the most important thing that people tend to forget is that it’s free marketing. If we go back to the days of traditional marketing where you used to pay for a full-page ad in a magazine or a newspaper – I was reading about how New York Times still charges up to USD $150,000 for a full-page spread. Whilst NYT still has a large readership, social media has an audience into the billions.
Social media gives you the opportunity to get direct customer feedback, you can build that relationship almost instantaneously and the networking opportunities are huge. You can direct message someone on Instagram and build a collaboration – it takes seconds to do that. Before, you might have had to go through someone’s assistant or the switchboard but now you can go directly to an Instagram profile or Facebook profile and message them.
C: That’s great so it’s going to cost a lot less than traditional marketing and also you can start to develop more of a relationship with your customers vs a print ad which is very one-way.
K: The other thing is the ability to track the feedback you’re getting in real-time. Whilst traditional methods may be effective in some instances, you’re not able to track the ROI on that. You can track the amount of feedback you’re getting through analytics or the comments and engagement you’re getting.
With a website, you’re giving yourself the ability to customise based on your brand. You’re giving yourself a home base – it’s there. A few downsides are maintenance, you have to pay for the hosting but it’s fully owned by you. Traditional print media is a very one-way system. You’re putting content out there and you’re not giving anybody the platform to respond back to you. By having a social media platform, what you’re doing is you’re inviting constant feedback from the things you’re putting out.
C: So social media is definitely more dynamic than having a website? So if you’re just starting out on social media and maybe you set up an account a few years ago and you haven’t really posted much on it. What can you do now to get followers and get your account going?
K: Trying to find the right platform for you can be difficult. One of the ways you can get around it is by posting content. One of the most important things is consistency. If you’re not posting regularly, you’re not going to be able to find out what the right platform is for you. If you’re posting once a week, you’re not giving your audience the ability to even discover your content.
C: Okay, so more than once a week(!)
K: Absolutely! For example, Instagram, let’s say I put 3-4 posts today, and people are engaging with that post. Those people who are engaging with that post are going to be seeing my posts more often because what Instagram says is that the algorithm is going to treat my posts as their ‘family/friends circle’ and it’ll show the audience and those people who have liked my posts more of my content. It’s hyper-targeted content that’s going towards these people. If you’re new to it, the best way to try and figure out what’s right is by consist