Setting Goals for Your Restaurant Social Media Marketing

This is the third post in our series comprising The Beginner’s Guide to Restaurant Social Media Marketing. View our first post on getting started here, including an important app you’ll want to download. Our second post shared six keys to getting started.

If you’re really going to accomplish anything with your restaurant’s social media marketing efforts, it’s gonna happen because you’ve got a gameplan for what you want to accomplish digitally and what it’s going to deliver in-location.

Let’s talk about setting goals for your restaurant social media marketing.

We won’t give you a template, as every brand has a different degree of resources (time, money, and people) to leverage, but we’ll give you some important points to consider.

Your first and most important decision

A new, major social platform emerges just about every three years now — and you can’t realistically dominate on all of them. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, even Snapchat.

Believe it or not, decision #1 is to identify which platforms makes the most sense for you based on time, money, and people. Just getting started? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest deserve your attention.

This doesn’t mean you’re going to be posting all day every day on these four; it just means you’re establishing an outpost there — a place where you can communicate and connect with customers.

Once that’s out of the way, you’ll want to think through like a true marketer, and imagine your series of possible calls to action. A call to action is what you want a reader to do once they’ve seen your message.

Visiting a location shouldn’t be your only call to action

The most obvious call to action you’ll ever use is to visit a location. But that’s not the only one you’ll ever want to use.

You can establish a following by influencing people to follow you here or there, to engage with your brand in this way or that way, without a call to action to visit a location. THAT is how you begin to build a brand.

We talk a lot about Chipotle here at NextRestaurants. It’s because they get this sort of thing. When you watch Farmed & Dangerous, you’re engaging with their brand in subtle ways. You’re getting lured in.

When you go to a brand’s Facebook page to enter a sweepstakes, you’re engaged with that brand without buying the product. Local brands — independent restaurants — can do this, too. Consider calls to action in your social media marketing that aren’t limited to visits.

With that said, here is a starter set of goals you’ll want to address and/or questions you’ll want to ask yourself:

Setting activity goals:

How much time can I dedicate to this each week? (You’ll want to dedicate time to three specific activities listening to your followers and monitoring mentions of your brand, posting new content, and replying/commenting on others’.)
How many non-promotional posts can I commit to each day or week?
Who am I willing to let post on our behalf?
When will I catch up on replies and launch or schedule retweets and comments on others’ posts? How many can I manage per day, maximum?
How many new people will I follow each day or week?
What promotions will I run via social media? When will I run them?

Setting results-oriented goals:

How many new email subscribers do I want to add via social?
How much measurable traffic will I drive (as determined by offer redemptions and check-ins)?
What kind of average check size should I see via social media promotions?
How does our social following compare to the same period last year? More followers? More engagement? More measurable revenue?

You can view social media as a communication channel, but it is a viable marketing channel just as much. You just want to be careful not to constantly broadcast your offers.

Setting the right kind of social media goals can help you stay on-target in getting the most from your restaurant’s social media marketing efforts.