If you run a takeaway or fast food restaurant and want to use social media to find more customers and take your business to the next level, then you may be wondering where to begin.
There is so much competition out there, with a 34% increase in fast food outlets between 2010 and 2018.
If you want to stand out from the crowd and get more people to buy your food, you need to know how to rock social media and get people to engage with you.
Below, we’ve rounded up some of our top social media post ideas for takeaways and fast food outlets to help you grow your audience, find new customers, and sell more food.
Post images of your food
It’s the most obvious point on this list, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless.
So many small takeaways and fast food companies fail to share images of their actual food on their social media channels and instead use generic shots taken from the internet.
Sure, those shots might look more appetizing than your food, but people won’t want to visit your place if they can’t see what they’re going to be buying, so pull out the digital camera and dish up some of your grub.
You may choose to hire a professional photographer or do it on your own, instead.
Our top tip for taking photographs of food: serve up your food on a plate, rather than in a box or takeaway carton, and take images during the day when there’s lots of natural light.
This will result in shots that are brighter, more appetizing and more professional-looking.
This takeaway shares some delicious-looking shots of their parmos, a Teesside delicacy.
Tie-in promotions to upcoming events
Britons are becoming more health conscious than ever before, and as such, it can be tough to tempt them into ordering a pizza or a curry when they’re trying to cut back.
One of the best ways to do this is to tie your food in with upcoming events, whether that be Halloween, a Bank Holiday weekend, or even a big weekend on the telly, like The X Factor Final Shows.
There’s no better way to promote your food and remind people that you exist than by sharing some images or a custom-made graphic to tie in with a big night – even more so if you are running a special offer in your takeaway that will make your food even more tempting.
This takeaway used Twitter to remind customers that they can buy tickets to an upcoming event from their premises – and perhaps buy themselves a bag of chips whilst they’re there!
Share information on your ingredients
As we’ve just mentioned, consumers are becoming fussier when it comes to eating out – and they want to know that the food they’re eating is not only made from high-quality ingredients but also that it’s safe to eat.
You only have to look at the recent takeaway scandal, which saw two men jailed for the manslaughter of a 15-year-old girl who suffered an allergic reaction to her food.
You can use social media to become a responsible business and let people know exactly what they’re eating.
This works particularly well for takeaways that use lots of high-quality local ingredients, as you can use this as a selling point and encourage more people to try you out – you could even share images of potatoes being picked from a farm, only to be turned into hand-cut chips and fried.
A video of the process would work great!
Post user-generated content
One great way to add some creativity to your social media channels and encourage people to like, share and engage with your posts is to ask for user-generated content.
The chances are that the majority of your customers – particularly the millennial market – are going to take a picture or two when their food is delivered, so ask whether you can repost it on your own channels and get them involved in marketing your business.
If you’re a savvy entrepreneur and want to create lots of user-generated content, then you could run a competition and ask people to share selfies of them eating your food, and give a winner a voucher for some free takeaways – or even donate some money to charity.
Domino’s regularly runs user-generated content campaigns on social media – and they work well to remind people of the brand and act as “social proof” that their products are the best.
Be creative, and have fun!
Not everything you post on social media has to relate to your business and your food, so get creative and post some original content that’s bound to go down well.
Videos, memes and other content can be found on sites like Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit, and you can share these on your channels provided you ask for permission and give credit where necessary.
You could also create your own content, like recording videos of your staff taking on silly challenges in the kitchen, or create custom graphics using tools like Canva that are fun, quirky and suit your company branding.
The possibilities are endless, and there’s little that can go wrong, so be creative, experimental, and see what provokes the biggest reaction.
Check out this custom graphic we created in less than five minutes. Feel free to steal it for your social channels, or use it as a template for creating something suited to your brand.
Wrapping up
When you’re hard at work preparing food and taking orders, social media is the last thing you’d want to worry about, but scheduling content in advance and working hard to build up your audience will help you to become a household name in your local area.
If you need some help, then get in touch with the team at 99social today.
We offer affordable social media management from as little as ÂŁ99 per month, freeing up your time to worry about more important business tasks, like coming up with new ideas for pizza toppings!