So your restaurant has a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a Twitter handle, and a TikTok feed. Now what?
Now you need help managing all of these accounts. Fortunately, there are all kinds of excellent tools designed to optimize the use of social media for restaurants. The top social media tools can help you create images, schedule posts, track engagement, and much more.
6 Tools To Enhance Social Media for Restaurants
The best social media tools for your restaurant will depend on your digital marketing goals and needs. But a combination of the right tools can improve your social media visibility, engagement, and conversion rates.
1. Buffer
Like many other social media tools, Buffer provides engagement tracking and post scheduling. Buffer’s video posting and scheduling functions are particularly intuitive. Video content tends to see the highest engagement on social media, which makes Buffer a valuable tool for restaurants. Buffer also offers a built-in photo creation and editing software called Pablo. This feature makes it easy to adjust photo dimensions and file sizes according to each social media platform's specifications.
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an extremely dynamic social media tool, offering advanced publishing tools, real-time engagement tracking, and in-depth analytics. Sprout can even help you identify influencers that might fit your brand. On top of that, Sprout is very user-friendly. Sprout provides detailed, easy-to-follow reports on user engagement—a notable contrast to the convoluted “Insights” offered by platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Sprout will even provide you with alerts indicating the best times to post based on your audience’s behavior.
Sprout’s post scheduler is also a cut above the competition. With Sprout, you can create a single post for publication across multiple platforms, and schedule this post to publish at multiple times throughout a campaign. This takes the repetitive tedium out of social media messaging and ensures that you cast the widest possible net.
In other words, Sprout is the cream of the crop when it comes to social media for restaurants. This tool isn’t free, however. Sprout comes at a cost of $99 per user, per month.
3. Canva
A big part of effective social media marketing is grabbing your audience’s attention. The images you post on social media play an important role in pulling eyes toward your content as well as conveying your restaurant’s style and aesthetic. Canva is a tool that allows you to do this with ease.
There’s a bit of a learning curve when it comes to using professional photo editing programs like Photoshop. Canva, on the other hand, makes it easy for anybody to resize images, use filters, overlay text, and more. Canva also comes with tons of social media templates that can be customized for various social media platforms with interchangeable images, GIFs and fonts.
Bonus: You can even use Canva to create menus and newsletters. The best part? Canva’s asic package is totally free. That said, you can upgrade to Canva Pro ($9.99/month) or Canva Enterprise ($30/month) for access to more advanced features and virtually endless storage space.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite was one of the first social media scheduling applications on the market. Today, Hootsuite is still among the very best social media tools for businesses of every kind. In addition to post scheduling across all social media platforms, Hootsuite provides support for marketing campaign creation and comprehensive data analytics.
Hootsuite also offers advanced features for maximizing the impact of your social media activity including data-driven insights on the best times to post, tools for helping increase engagement, and tools for managing paid advertising content. Hootsuite is truly a one-stop shop, packed with all the necessary features to enhance marketing through social media for restaurants.
5. RepCheckup
Customer feedback is an invaluable source of data. RepCheckup gives you a fast, easy and convenient way to find out what customers are saying about your restaurant on the most popular review sites. RepCheckup is a totally free review management app that sends a push notification any time you receive an online review.
Think of RepCheckup as “Google Alerts” for reviews. You’ll receive a notification every time a review publishes anywhere online—Yelp, Google, Trip Advisor, you name it! RepCheckup also syncs your activities on all online review and social media accounts, which makes it easier than ever to respond to customers wherever they post their reviews.
6. Social Report
Social Report is a great way to integrate every element of your digital marketing mix into a single unified strategy. Use Social Report to create a hub for managing your social media accounts, monitoring your status on business review sites like Yelp, and even administrating your eCommerce store on Shopify.
Social Report’s dashboard includes a “smart inbox” that aggregates all online mentions into regular and easily digestible reports so that you can see where your social media and digital marketing efforts are making the biggest impact.
Taking Your Restaurant Marketing to the Next Level
While there are a variety of tools that can help streamline marketing through social media for restaurants, an effective social media strategy still requires constant oversight, active engagement, and adaptation to emergent data trends.
Many restaurants turn to support from experienced third-party providers to implement truly impactful social media strategies. Reach out today and schedule a consultation to find out how your restaurant could benefit from the help of a third-party digital marketing provider.
