By Kasey Mcelroy
The holiday season is undoubtedly one of the best times for restaurant owners to engage with potential clients on social media. People love to eat, drink and be merry over the holidays, which means there are plenty of ways for you to engage with customers, drive sales, and build brand awareness this time of year. However, holidays are often the busiest times for restaurant owners, which is why it’s essential to create relevant and engaging content that attracts the attention of your client base.
Learning how to create engaging content can be a trial-and-error process that is tricky at best and time-consuming at worst – unless you have a social media manager, that is. During the holidays, many business owners don’t have the time to review their social media strategies. Thankfully, if you’re looking for a way to create content that matters to your audience and highlights your offerings, you’re not alone. Below, we’ve gathered some advice from our team at Social High Rise to help your business flourish this holiday season.
Know Your Audience And Plan Ahead
The most vital part of any social media campaign is creating content specifically for your target audience. However, identifying your target audience involves a relatively in-depth analysis of the customers you serve. While most business owners generally know who they serve, developing social media content that is effective and reaches new customers requires a tailored approach.
Most social media platforms have developed intelligent algorithms that choose whether or not to highlight and recommend specific content to an individual user. Therefore, business owners that create content that aligns with their target audiences are more likely to have their posts appear in follower feeds. There are plenty of great resources online to help guide business owners in identifying their target audiences. Once you’ve identified these audiences, it’s easier to create content that matters to each demographic.
Creating great content that aligns with your audience is the first step, planning ahead for it is the next crucial step for a great holiday social media strategy. Once you fully understand your audience and craft those festive posts, schedule your holiday content in a scheduler platform like Hootsuite so you can sit back and relax on Christmas morning knowing your content will go out as planned.
Show Us, Don’t Tell Us
When considering social media algorithms, it’s important to remember that platforms like Facebook and Instagram prioritize posts that include high-quality photographs and video clips. However, there are more benefits to taking advantage of photos and video than just increasing your post reach. Post reach is important, but adding photos and videos to your social media posts has multiple benefits.
When people scroll through social media posts, they’re usually not looking to read a novel. Posts on social media that have multiple lines of text require more “mental energy” than most users are willing to expend. As a result, users often skim through text-only posts without absorbing the content.
The opposite is true about posts with images, however. Think back to the last time you were online and saw a photo of someone’s holiday dinner or an image of one of your favorite restaurant’s menu items. You can likely still remember what it looked like and how it made you feel. Images stand out in our short-term memory, and as a result, they drive action.
During the holidays, everyone has a lot on their mind. Therefore, posting a photo of some of your best-looking meals, or most recognizable servers makes your business stand out in your customer’s minds. When they’re considering where they want to eat that evening, they’ll remember, “Oh, that restaurant near me has happy hour, and their food looked incredible.” Your photo and video content should help subconsciously drive sales. Pro tip: Scope your restaurant’s tagged photos on Instagram for user-generated content that not only makes your grid look more authentic, but deepens those B2C relationships when you give the user credit on your posts.
Need tips on what makes great holiday content? Check out this guide How to Create Great Social Media Posts for the Holidays
Driving Value
Ultimately, the most effective social media strategy is showing your customers why they should choose your restaurant over others during the holiday season. Whether this means being a great spot for a warm meal, offering gift cards, or providing catering for large parties, it’s important to make sure your customers know what’s available. Most shoppers look for affordability, convenience, and value during the holiday season, so driving your business’s value through your social media content is vital to success. You can get fun and festive with it too. It is the most wonderful time of the year, after all!
Driving value means something different for each business. When you create your social media content this holiday season, consider how you can make someone’s day easier, their shopping less stressful, or give them a bit of holiday cheer. Customers want to feel as though you have their best interests at heart, especially during the holidays. Crafting messages and sharing images that show you your care is a great place to start.
While there are tons of great ways to engage with your customers during the holidays, managing your social media can seem a little bit overwhelming. If you’d like to learn more about how Social High Rise can help your business create great content, reach out to us today. Happy holidays, ya’ll!
Did you know?
We've been managing social media accounts for restaurants since 2012. For almost a decade, we've partnered with restauranteurs who are serious about using social media to generate business. Whether you're a good fit for our service or not, let's schedule a call and we'll give you free personalized advice on how to improve your social media presence. Either way, you'll walk away from the call more confident about your ability to promote yourself online - completely for free.
