Facebook Best Practice Guide: Local Restaurant Widen’s Hotdogs
Widen’s Hotdogs is a small, family-owned, fast-food restaurant serving the South Side of the Chicagoland area for over 30 years. I have known the owner Mark for many years and have also got to know his family as well, by visiting their restaurant. Widen’s currently doesn’t have an excellent social media presence on any platforms, the owner, Mark, asked me to help him with his social media initiatives to make it better.
Being a small local restaurant, word of mouth has been the primary source of reaching new customers from friends to friends, family members, and local community members have all spread the word about their business. Widen’s Hotdogs is in a great location near many shopping centers and along a main street with much traffic, so exposure is not a problem.
The platform we plan is to grow Widen’s Hotdogs Facebook account. The account currently has 591 followers, and 393 people have checked into this location. The company page needs to be enhanced to reach the market successfully.
Here are some of the benefits of Facebook: such as having a call-to-action button to bring people right to the website for menus.
Use videos & photos
We want to use photos of posts of all the delicious foods that are carried in order to make people hungry and think about coming for lunch or dinner.
Pictures of happy customers eating inside the restaurant with captions of how much they love Widen’s Hotdogs. This is a family restaurant, so photos of the family working and how it started to create a relationship with the customer and finally, pictures of daily specials and soups for that day.
How Often/ What Time to Post
Scheduling posts for certain times of day will help us post simultaneously before the lunch crowd and then again for the dinner crowd with pictures of our food and specials for that day. These are the ideal times to post on social media when people are more likely to be on their accounts. Below are ideas for posts and statistics about how long the posts should be.
- Post at least 3x a day
- Daily from 10am — 5pm CST
- Friday 10am — 11am and 2pm-5pm CST
- Saturday & Sunday 9am — 11am & 2pm-5pm CST
- Ideal post length: between 1 –80 characters
- 40 characters or less –receive 86% higher engagement
- 80 characters or less –receive 88% higher engagement
- 120 characters –receive 23% higher engagement
- Max post length: 63,206 characters (less is always more!)
Hashtag
For Facebook, hashtags can be a helpful tool. This helps people find posts about topics they’re interested in. To make a hashtag, write # (the number sign) along with a topic or phrase and add it to your post. When customers click a hashtag, you’ll see a feed of posts that include that hashtag.
- #WidensHotdogs
- #WidensHotdogsSpecials
Color Scheme
The colors are rich and bright to grab our customers’ attention when advertising in local papers and when we improve our social media presence.
This color scheme includes red, black, and white, which are eye-catching.
In conclusion, compared to Instagram, a photo-sharing platform, Facebook allows companies to build relationships with customers and get their brand out there. Therefore, the social media platform by which customers use the most is Facebook. It leads to more brand loyalty from a community and will help increase website and restaurant traffic.