What You Need to Know About Your Venue’s Social Media Presence
Do you have a social media presence for your venue?
Millions of people worldwide go to social media every day in search of bars and restaurants.
On these social media platforms, posts about food and drinks dominate the platforms and are some of the most popular posts on social media.
A quick search on Instagram reveals that there are hundreds of millions of posts about food and drinks.
According to statistics, at least 75% of consumers purchase products because they saw them on social media.
From this percentage, at least 60% of them needed to see the product 3 to 4 times before deciding to purchase.
This goes to show how popular food and drinks content is on social media and how much marketing potential these platforms hold.
For a bar social media marketing strategy to work, it needs to focus on creating awareness about the bar and actually getting people to come to the bar.
Here is everything you need to know about leveraging social media to boost your bar’s social media presence.
15 tips to creating an effective social media presence for a venue:
1. Create a good social media profile
2. Mention your venue’s exact name
3. Fill out all of your profiles
4. Set up multiple locations on Facebook
5. Add interesting facts
6. Implement different social media strategies
7. Check your competitors’ content background
8. Use HD quality images
9. Use strong and consistent brand voice
10. Use social media influencers for your campaign
11. Collaborate with other businesses
12. Use hashtags
13. Promote discounts
14. Share user content
15. Gather reviews
16. Boost influencer content
1. Create a good social media profile
If you are just getting started on building your bar’s social media presence, you need to create an account on platforms such as Facebook, TripAdvisor, Google for my business, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram.
2. Mention your venue’s exact name
You need to use your bar’s name as it is used in the business permit. This is highly critical for brand awareness and marketing purposes.
3. Fill out all of your profiles
Ensure you fill out all the sections required to have a complete profile.
Having a complete profile on social media makes it easier for visitors to find information about you.
Ensure you fill out the information about your operating hours, contact details.
The most important data like working hours and contact details should be on the home page to ensure visitors can find the info without clicking through the page.
You can add a book now button if your bar takes reservations, upload a menu and take out button, type of cuisine you serve, allow reviews, and add extra info like whether it is suitable for groups or kids.
4. Set up multiple locations on Facebook
Facebook is one of the most ideal platforms to set up a bar page since it allows you to add multiple locations where your bar is located.
The beauty of this feature is that interested patrons get information about the branch closest to them.
When creating your bar’s social media presence, you should consider the main page as the mother page and create sub-pages for the locations.
5. Add interesting facts
Anyone coming to your social media page is looking for information that will entice them to visit your bar.
Therefore, it always helps to add interesting facts about your bar on your socials. You can add information about events you host on different days and other interesting facts about your bar.
6. Implement different social media strategies
Now that you have fully set up social media pages, you need to have a social media strategy. This involves displaying the best content for your bar to ensure you reach the right audience.
To succeed in your strategy, you need to look at your social media the way potential clients look at it. This will help you fill your feed with the best content.
Here are effective social media marketing ideas you can use for your bar.
7. Check your competitors’ content background
For any business to flourish, it needs to strive to do better than its greatest competition.
If there are bars competing in your niche, you need to check their content background to have an idea of the kind of posts your target audience responds to.
Pay attention to the tone of voice, posting schedule, and response rates to know how to build your own campaign.
8. Use HD quality images
Images are the most potent content types in social media. Posting high-quality HD images of your beverages and space is an easy way of attracting the attention of fun lovers looking for a place to unwind and have fun.
When you post images of inviting drinks, you make people want to try them, therefore encouraging them to visit your bar. The use of high-quality images is a simple yet effective marketing strategy used by most successful bars.
9. Use strong and consistent brand voice
To stand out from the competition, you need to create a consistent and strong voice for your brand.
This makes it easier for you to connect with your target market while improving your brand image.
Your brand voice should clearly communicate what you stand for. If your bar is about complete indulgence and having a good time, your brand voice should communicate that.
Find what makes your bar stand out and use it as your voice. If you offer the best cocktails and music, you need to make these attributes the center of your social media campaigns.
10. Use social media influencers for your campaign
Social media influencers are some of the best marketing options for bars.
You can collaborate with social media influencers for curated hosting experiences. To promote your brand, they post reviews about your bar on their social media pages with millions of potential clients. You can also have influencers host parties at your bar to attract their followers.
When choosing the influencers to work with, you need to find one with an audience fit for your target niche. This should be based on demographics and location. You also need an influencer with an engaged audience. This is shown by the number of comments and likes their posts get.
11. Collaborate with other businesses
Social media marketing is all about creating brand visibility.
One of the best ways to promote your bar is through collaborations with other businesses.
If you work closely with different brands, you can offer your space for product promotions.
This will allow you to tap into their audience since they will need to advertise the promotions on their social platforms to attract participants.
The best businesses for collaborations should be non-competing ones.
12. Use hashtags
Hashtags have become one of the best social media features that can be leveraged to amplify your bar’s social media presence.
There are hundreds of hashtags for bars and drinks you can choose from. However, the trick is picking the most influential hashtags to increase brand visibility.
The best hashtags have millions of followers.
These can be great choices for reaching a large audience with each post, but they also come with very high competition. To succeed with the use of hashtags, you need to mix popular hashtags with less popular ones. This increases your chances of ranking for these hashtags.
To narrow your options, you can use hashtags that relate to the kind of drinks you serve.
If you are a wine bar, you can find hashtags for wine bars to improve your presence with the right audience. you can also narrow down your hashtag options by location.
If your restaurant is located in Vegas, you can use common Vegas bar hashtags like #LasVegasBar or #vegasbar.
A successful hashtag strategy involves finding the perfect balance for trendy, less popular, and highly relevant niche-based hashtags.
Fortunately, most social media platforms allow you to add multiple hashtags for each post.
How to leverage social media
Social media marketing is about making people want to come to your bar. While some of the tips above will build curiosity and get you visitors, you can still use other tips to make your bar even more appealing to your target audience.
13. Promote discounts
Offering discounts can be a great way to promote your bar’s social media presence and make followers want to come to your bar.
For an offer to work, it needs to be appealing enough to influence the recipient’s decision and should come with a time limit. Happy hours are some of the most influential discount promos used by bars. You can have a happy hour scheduled for specific times to incentivize your target audience to want to take advantage of the offer before it runs out.
14. Share user content
For your social media pages to remain relevant, they need to have fresh content at all times. Most bars solve the need for fresh content by sharing user-generated content. Most patrons take pictures and post on their social tagging the location. This can provide valuable content for your socials and also doubles as free marketing. Be sure to seek permission from the owner before using their images on your platforms.
15. Gather reviews
Facebook is one of the best platforms to include user reviews. The recommendations and reviews page is usually the first page on a Facebook business page. Posting reviews on your social media pages can have a huge impact on your bar’s social media presence. At least 93% of consumers take time to read reviews, and 90% of consumers agree that reviews help to inform their purchasing decisions.
Once you set up your social media pages, you need to encourage your visitors to leave reviews as these give potential clients an idea of what it will be like to visit your bar.
16. Boost influencer content
Inviting influencers to your venue is a great idea for reaching new people and for raising brand awareness of your venue.
But asking influencers to post content isn’t the best strategy there is.
This is because the majority of the people viewing and following that influencer won’t necessarily be within distance of your venue.
Instead, you should look to boost influencer content to reach your exact target audience.
On Instagram you can create a brand partnership ad, and on TikTok you can create a spark ad.
This allows you to take the influencers content and boost it to your ideal audience, e.g. 19 – 26 year olds within 1km of your venue.
This is incredibly powerful because the ad is then coming from the influencer and not from you, which is far more authentic.
The bottom line
Social media is one of the best ways to attract new patrons to your bar and keep the old ones coming back. With the tips highlighted in this article, you can choose the most relevant ones to your target audience and use them to boost your bar’s social media presence.
