Over the past decade, Twitter has gone from strength to strength and it now stands as a superb marketing platform for all types of businesses. For restaurants especially, the site is fantastic because you can upload your menu, advertise special offers, communicate with customers, advertise your food with colorful images, and more. Today, we are going to discuss the main features that you should be looking to use in 2017!
Profile – Before we go any further, you need your bio and profile picture to be as good as can be. Remember, the picture is often the first thing people see so use your logo. In terms of your bio, this should contain a brief introduction of what you offer, business hours, items on the menu, and your tagline and logo once again.
Follow Carefully – As well as your profile, you also need to be cautious with who you follow because people will keep an eye on this list. Rather than clogging up your feed and affiliating your business with nonsense accounts, follow only those necessary and treat it like the business account it is. If you need advice in this area, Twitter Analytics gives great recommendations for who to follow in your niche.
Lists – On Twitter, ‘Lists’ is actually a severely underused feature but we are looking to change this fact. On your account, you are allowed around 1,000 lists with 5,000 accounts in each and they can be great for interacting with bloggers and various vendors to create a buzz around your restaurant. In addition to this, they will help you to keep abreast of all latest products and services.
Direct Messaging – If you have a Twitter account already, we can almost guarantee that you disabled Direct Messaging and you wouldn’t be alone because this is something many businesses do. However, leaving it open will allow angry customers to send you a message directly rather than leaving a tweet on your profile for the whole world to see so it is definitely something to consider!
Moments – If you are looking to boost engagement on your page, the new Moments feature is a great starting point. As a tool for content curation, you can share numerous tweets regarding an event, product launch, trend, or whatever you want to bring to your follower’s attention.
Twitter Ads – In recent years, Twitter advertising has improved somewhat and it now allows for targeted campaigns so you can reach out to the people who are most likely to visit your restaurant. In addition to searching for the right Twitter users, you can also search using hashtags so look out for the hashtags being used by current customers. Over time, you could use these to find new customers!
Coupon Marketing – When you choose to go with coupon-based marketing, you know that there are going to be various benefits to experience. As well as offering customers personalized rewards, you will obtain vital information about customers moving forward and the system almost feeds on itself. Using Twitter, you can offer exclusivity to customers to improve the visibility of your brand and boost the loyalty in your customer base. Eventually, the likes and shares will lead to success.
Trending – On the homepage of Twitter, you have probably seen the trending topics section but have you ever used these for your business? As well as breaking news, trending topics can also be planned events through one or multiple channels. If you have enough followers (you can team up with another company, if not), you can try to get a particular hashtag into the trending topics and the awareness of your brand will skyrocket in a matter of hours.
Engagement – With Twitter engagement, many businesses make the mistake of constantly advertising a product or a service but this soon gets frustrating to watch. According to the 80/20 rule, 80% of all your conversations should be simple interaction with followers whereas 20% contribute to the programs and goals of the brand. Essentially, this ensures that customers feel as though their opinions are being taken into account and their kind words are appreciated.
Customer Service – In years gone by, customers would have to talk to you in person or send a letter when they have praise or an issue. With Twitter, it has given them a new platform because they see a response much quicker. Therefore, allow your brand to get a great reputation for responding to customer service issues and all watching will respect your efforts.
Pictures – Ever wondered why Instagram is so popular? As a species, humans react well to photos and they instantly grab our attention. As a business, you need to utilize this information and add images to your posts. According to a recent study, tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than those that don’t. Furthermore, interaction is also stronger with images so upload these along with videos even if it is something taken quickly on a smartphone; these can be just as effective as professional shots.
Influencers – On Twitter, you will find ‘influencers’ who are people with a significant following. Along with celebrities, the list has grown to include bloggers, vloggers, and many others in recent years. Once you have found the ones in your niche, reach out to them every once in a while to see if they want to visit your restaurant and get involved with helping your brand. Considering they have potentially hundreds of thousands of followers all trusting their word, this could be a good strategy this year.
Twitter Analytics – How are you supposed to progress if you don’t analyze the success of previous posts? With Twitter Analytics, you can see how many impressions and clicks your posts receive which allows you to learn the most successful posts as well as posting times throughout the day.
As you can see, Twitter is pivotal in a marketing strategy and these thirteen tips will have you progressing this year. As long as you pay attention to this advice, there is no reason why your brand can’t increase in popularity in the months ahead.