Running a small business means wearing a lot of different hats, from ordering food to plating it, along with admin tasks like bookkeeping, staffing, and marketing. As busy as you are, see if this hat fits — social media can be a powerful tool to help grow your business, connect with customers in meaningful ways, and make a real impact.

According to research, more than 70% of restaurant guests use social media to discover new restaurants and say they’re more likely to recommend a restaurant if they can get a quick response to their inquiries on social media sites. But before making a social media plan for your restaurant, it’s important to understand the why’s and how’s behind this powerful tool.

Interacting with guests on social media is all about building relationships, and the best relationships are built on trust. If your viewers know, like, and trust you, they will be more likely to engage with you and, ultimately, buy from you.

Here, we take a look at “The Know, Like, and Trust Factor” approach to social media marketing and how it can help your business grow.

Getting to Know You

Use social media posts, including video content, to share more details about your restaurant with your guests and followers. Here are some ideas for what to share:

• Menu highlights and daily specials with vivid, beautiful images.

• Behind-the-scenes ‘How it’s Made’ videos.

• Meet-the-staff posts (Include a recommendation for a dish and beverage from each employee featured).

• Interesting facts about the building or business itself, especially if there’s a historical angle.

• Spotlights on community partners, farmers, and artisans that you work with.

• High-quality photos that establish the setting and vibe of your restaurant.

Getting to Like You

Tone is extremely important when it comes to social media. It helps communicate your brand culture to your followers. Spend some time thinking about what you want your tone to convey. Do you want to be serious, playful, funny, earnest? Consider the consistency of your brand voice every time you post on social media because the post is coming from the brand itself, not whoever is posting, and followers will see those posts for, potentially, years to come.

• Keep the tone positive.

• Share positive reviews, good press, and stories of ways your business has contributed to the community.

• Don’t use corporate, commercial, AI, or otherwise ‘sales’ language.

• Avoid complaining about vendors, staff, guests (we know you would never!), construction, the weather, or anything else.

Getting to Trust You

Being positive doesn’t mean ignoring the obvious truth of a situation. Followers will be able to tell if you’re trying too hard to spin something. Social media can also be a good outlet for direct communication with your followers to let them know the truth about what’s going on behind the scenes so that they have a better understanding (and more realistic expectations) of your challenges.

• Be transparent.

• Share consistently and authentically.

• Share testimonials that show how other people feel about your brand.

Joining the Conversation

Social media is more than just show-and-tell. It’s a potential conversation with your audience, both as a whole and on an individual level. It’s especially important that you treat these interactions thoughtfully. Here are some best practices for communicating with guests online:

• Either respond to inquiries promptly (within an hour during business hours) or set up an auto-responder that includes the best way to contact the restaurant and a link to your website (where you should have answers to any question a guest might need a quick response to, such as hours, location, and how to make reservations).

• Be consistent in your tone of voice. It should mirror the positive transparency of your posts.

• Go beyond likes and emojis, and respond with full (natural, authentic sounding) sentences conveying your interest in the guest’s experience.

• Ask questions! The best way to engage is to ask curious questions about the guest’s experience.

• Cultivate a community of ambassadors that spread good messages about your brand, either through testimonials or in their own social media content. This is basically the modern version of ‘word of mouth’ advertising, which is worth its weight in gold.

Plan Ahead

Anyone who’s attempted to manage social media for a brand can tell you that burnout is real. With burnout comes inconsistency and sloppiness — just like what you’d see from a burned-out cook on the line or a fatigued server on the floor. To avoid burnout, it can be helpful to rely on content management tools to alleviate some of the daily burden.

Some platforms (Facebook and Instagram) allow you to queue posts in advance, and there are also services (Later, Buffer) that can do the same thing. Take the time to learn how to use these tools and then queue posts in advance for up to a month at a time.

• Use this formula when creating weekly content: 3 ‘Know, Like, Trust’ posts + 2 Sales Posts + 1 Video.

• Queue posts in advance for up to a month at a time.

• Be aware of when events in the world may change the reception of posts you’ve queued up in advance. For example, if you’ve queued a post about enjoying the patio on a day when it’s raining outside, you should go in and shuffle things around so that the content reflects reality. Likewise, if there’s a tragic event in the news, you may want to reconsider posting a silly video that day in favor of something more somber.

• Build 15 to 20 minutes a day into your schedule for answering questions, responding to comments, and engaging with other people’s content.

Marathon, Not a Sprint

Often, business owners get frustrated when it seems like their efforts on social media aren’t immediately paying off in terms of sales. It’s important to understand that this kind of relationship-building and community formation requires time and consistency.

• Commit to a social media plan for no less than a year and wait to see the impact.

• Consider that the true impact may be difficult to measure and is not necessarily reflected in likes or comments.

• Play around with a few different types of content to see what strikes a chord with your audience.

• Use all of the tools on each platform to improve your reach. For example, on Instagram, in addition to static, in-feed posts, consider adding Reels and Stories, and use hashtags (which help with discoverability), geotags (where you’re located), and social tags (when you tag another user).