1. Cooking tips from the chef.
2. Survey your fans on any topic.
3. Feature your ingredient sourcing, especially local ones.
4. Large, high-quality photos of your food.  
5. Questions that your fans can answer in the comment area.  Why do they call them French Fries? Do they come from France?
6. Recipes from your guests.
7. Spotlight an employee.
8. Tonight’s special.
9. Photos of your guests enjoying your food.
10. New product introductions.
11. Pairing ideas for your food and beverages.
12. Kids activity ideas.
13. Profile your customer of the week.
14. Italian restaurant (or fill in your cuisine type): Post about the food, wine and holidays of Italy.
15. Profiles of (or provided by) your suppliers.
16. Photos of your sparkling clean (and empty) restrooms. Cleanliness is so important to your guests, and it will show you have a sense of humor!
17. Birthday blasts – names and/or photos of guests celebrating their birthday today.
18. Share posts of local groups or non-profits your restaurant supports. 
19. Contests or promotions. You can do something as simple as asking a trivia contest, and the first person to answer it right in the comments gets a FREE dinner.
20. Post testimonials from happy customers.
21. Create a Meme – choose a photo and add funny or inspirational text to it.
22. Post videos – your commercials or a fun video like your employees doing the latest dance.
23. Create an InfoGraphic. These are popular and often get shared, going viral.
24. Create weird statistics… “If all the straws used in our restaurant each year were laid end to end, it would stretch from Denver to Los Angeles.”
25. Raise awareness of your lesser-known features… “We also offer event catering,” “We deliver for business lunch meetings,” etc.

If you’re worried about the time it takes to create this content, delegate.  Many hands make for light work. Have the chef write some posts, the wine steward writes some posts, employees write some posts, and even engage your customers to provide content. Not only does it make your life easier, it increases the effectiveness of your social media as each of those participants (and their friends) are going to “Like” and “Share” their own posts!

If you’re old enough to remember life before social media, there used to be a big yellow book that got delivered to your doorstep every year called the Phone Book!  It had White Pages that listed everybody’s phone number in your town. It also had Yellow Pages where local advertisers would pay large fees every month to have their ad appear.  The more you paid, the larger your ad, and the larger your ad, the closer you would appear to the front of your section.  In five important ways, social media has replaced the Yellow Pages.

1.      INFORMATION – When you need to know store hours, or if a business is open, or a map to their location, where do you turn?  For the majority of people, it’s the internet.  Whether it’s on your phone or your desktop, a quick search provides the basic information you need.  However, different people search the internet in different ways.  Some would go directly to Google or Bing to search for you, while others would turn to Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest to search for your business.  That’s why it’s important to have a complete profile on all the major social sites.  It only takes a little time to set up, and each one will reach a different segment of the market.

2.      CONFIRMATION – Beyond basic information, your social media feeds provide confirmation to someone who is thinking about engaging with your business that you are legitimate and a good choice.  Imagine you need a plumber and you recently saw a ‘Joe’s Plumbing’ van driving through your neighborhood.  The next stop for most people these days would be Facebook or Instagram to check out Joe’s Plumbing.  First off, do they have a current profile with content that’s not from four years ago? Looking through their posts, as a consumer I can make a judgement that they do look professional and trustworthy and most important, a currently active business that can meet my needs. 

The flip side of this is when a business or organization doesn’t have up-to-date social content. We recently needed to get a quote for a roof replacement, which is a substantial investment. There was more than one local roofing company who didn’t even get a call to explore their availability and pricing because they didn’t have a social feed where I could browse through their posts to see if they felt like a professional I could put my trust in.

3.      VALIDATION – The old marketing saying is that the best form of advertising is word of mouth.  When friends recommend a place to other friends, that’s far more valuable than any paid advertising.  We trust those personal recommendations and are very likely to use that business.  It’s often hard for businesses to scale word of mouth recommendations because those are organic conversations that just happen at random moments in time. But with social media, validation by testimony can be used as a marketing tool. 

Customer feedback and testimonials can take a variety of forms online. No doubt you’ve seen the hundreds of customer feedback posts on every Amazon product.  For restaurants, sites like Yelp are filled with customer testimonials. And you can post testimonials or ask for customer feedback on your social profiles.  It also tends to happen naturally when you’re posting good content.  For example, a florist might post a photo of a flower arrangement, then customers will add their comments… “I sent this to my wife for her birthday and she loved it!”

4.      INQUIRIES – Social media is not just a one-way monologue.  More and more companies are using their social sites to receive customer feedback, questions and complaints.  We now have a generation who have never lived without social media, so they expect to be able to interact with companies on their medium of choice.  The ability to send a direct message is second nature to them because that’s how they communicate with their friends. Businesses today need to meet them where they are at and support the ability to communicate through social channels.

5.      LOCAL ADVERTISING – While business owners of old had to commit to a yearly contract to place ads in the yellow pages which then reached people all over their city, social media provides a way to advertise in a more targeted and affordable manner.  For most small businesses, customers live within a two or three mile radius from their location.  Social media ads allow you to target audiences in a variety of ways, including by specifying a radius around your location.  If your ideal customer is women over 30, then you can add that as a filter so your ads are only targeting women over 30 who live within 3 miles of your business. This ability to niche-target reduces your cost of advertising and improves the results as you are only talking to those who are most likely to become a customer.

The key to tapping into all the advantages of social media for small business marketing, is to post consistently on your social accounts.  There are plenty of tools available so you can schedule your posts in advance, so it doesn’t become a daily chore that could often get missed.  And with the available ready-to-post content of ProStockSocial.com, you can decrease the amount of original content you need to produce, while keeping that consistency that is so important to enjoy to benefits of social media.