Getting Followers That Become Your Customers: 5 Smart Social Media Tips

Getting Followers That Become Your Customers: 5 Smart Social Media Tips

As a new restaurant with aggressive competition already existing in the market, we had to take a look on how exactly can we stand out from competitors, what made our restaurant different from than the rest of Turkish restaurants in Kuwait? Why would customers want to choose our restaurant instead of competitors that serve the same thing?

Simple, because we utilized social media to our advantage, and here's how!

1) Find Followers That Want To Find YOU 

Seek out those who are interested in what you're serving, look up instagram accounts that love to explore new restaurants in your area, you can narrow your search by using hashtags, in our case #TurkishFood or #FoodGuideKuwait, once you click on relevant hashtags, you'll find many people posting, and commenting about Turkish food posts or food related posts in the area you're researching, which is a good point to start from. Many of those foodies would love to try your new restaurant if you get their attention, so how can you grab their attention? follow them, like their posts, genuinely comment on their posts, and share with them your latest offer, then wait. if they follow you back great! If they don't then unfollow them and keep doing the same thing.

Note: if they follow you back chances are their followers will be interested in what you're serving as well, so do follow them too! This way you easily managed to grab a few hundred clicks & followings to your business account.

2) Rule of 1 

No matter how cool you think your images look and how excited you are to share them with your followers, post no more than once a day, otherwise your followers will get sick of seeing you on their feed, which will backfire on you, by either getting muted or, unfollowed.

3) REPOST! 

We had customers that shared photos of their dining experience on their stories and posts on instagram, so to encourage them to go to our restaurant more often, and to share with their followers, I made sure to repost their stories in our story and thank them for stopping by, along with a fun comment or two! Best decision ever; People started tagging us more, sharing us with their 1k, 3k and even 155k followers! thats free advertising right there! All because they wanted to be featured on our account, and who wouldn't want that? They get to be featured on our 13.2K followers account, and we get their free advertisement. Everyone wins.

4) Short Captions 

As much as you think your words matter, you don't need your caption to be an entire novel! lol. The truth is no one cares to read, it takes people 3 seconds or less to decide if they'll scroll down or actually bother to see what you posted, so make the most out of those 3 seconds. Keep your caption short & sweet. For example, start with a greeting or a funny remark related to the picture being posted, then describe what's in the picture but again keep the description SHORT, and finally always add a call for action. That's it. Just by doing this we noticed in the following days our reservations have been booked full.

5) Work With Small and Big Influencers

 influencer sponsorship will help your business quite a lot, if you have the budget for it, pay big influencers to sponsor you, if you're running on a budget don't worry, there are so many small influencers with a few thousand followers that seek out business to recognize them, so by asking them to drop by your restaurant to review it either for free, or in an exchange for a free meal or for a discount, they'll be more than happy to post about you. that way you saved yourself thousands of Dirhams not sponsoring big influencers that can charge you up to 300k & more for a single post!

There are more tips I can offer you on this subject, but for now these are the 5 smart social media strategies that you can do today to help your business grow and stand out.

and finally, a big f*ck you to the ladies that doubted my potential, this one's for you.

Hope this post was helpful to you, best of luck.