How to WIN with a Great Organic Social Media Presence

There are two sides to social media, or at least in the way that we as marketers or as owners and operators who have to market our restaurants. There are two ways that we need to think about social media. On the one hand, as the paid side, right, and we talked about that last week on episode number 328, I gave you two simple tactics that when joined together create a paid strategy for Facebook and Instagram. But today I want to talk about organic social media. Specifically, I want to give you some quick tips. I want to hammer them home so that we understand the best way to use organic social media so we make the most of it. All of that on today's episode of Restaurant Strategy. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close and this is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated solely to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. Each week I leveraged my 25 years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and sustainable business. I also work with owners and operators from all over the world in my P3 Mastermind program. Now I talk about this every single week. But if this sounds like you, if you've got a restaurant spin around for a while, if you make a lot of people happy, if you generate a lot of revenue, but struggle to generate a consistent, predictable 20% return to the bottom line every single month, then I want to chat with you. The best way to start a conversation to see if the P3 Mastermind is right for you is to set up a call with someone from my team. You do that by visiting our website, restaurantstrategypodcast.com/schedule. We'll get to learn more about you and your restaurant. You'll get to learn more about the program that we run and we see if you're a good fit for that program. That call is absolutely free. There's no pressure to join. It's just a way for us to exchange information to see if it makes sense. And restaurantstrategypodcast.com/schedule. And yes, that link is in the show notes. Now today's episode is brought to you by seven shifts. Have you ever spent the past hour finalizing the schedule for next week, only to have an employee come run in and tell you that all of a sudden they need two days off? Or have you realized that you made a mistake on payroll right as you press submit? I've been there. And there's nothing fun about spending hours on manual updates. With seven shifts, you don't have to worry about that. You can make schedule updates in minutes with an easy drag and drop scheduler and skip the payroll mistakes in the first place with automated calculations. Seven shifts is a team management platform built specifically for restaurants. And right now, restaurantstrategypodcast listeners can get three months free. To get started, visit sevenshifts.com/restaurantstrategy. That's the number seven, s h i f t s dot com slash restaurant strategy. See just how simple it can be when you're payroll, scheduler and time clock all live under one roof. Again, seven shifts dot com slash restaurant strategy. And yes, that link is also in the show notes. Now today's episode is going to be short and sweet, but packed with very important information I want you to pay attention to this. If you are the one who manages your social media presence, then you're going to want to take notes. If someone else on your team handles this for you, you want to send this on to them. If you have an agency partner who manages your feeds, you want to send this to them. And you want to have a conversation about what we're going to talk about. Now listen very carefully. Today's episode is all about organic, but a full throttle, full integrated social media strategy includes both organic and paid. I want to be very clear when I say this. If you are paying someone to create content, curate content, schedule the content, post it and then engage with your team, that's great. But you also need them to handle the paid ads or you need to engage someone, an agency, a consultant, a partner who can run paid ads for you. And like we talked about last week, again, episode 326, you don't have to spend a lot of money to get started on social media advertising. But meta specifically Facebook and Instagram are the most sophisticated advertising platforms ever created. They are sophisticated because of the degree of specificity that you can target. You can target your audience based on demographics based on location, based on interests. You can target them with incredible granularity. But those tools are paid tools. So if you want to make sure that a specific person or a specific kind of person or a specific group of people sees your post, that is not what organic is all about. Okay. Spending all this money to only have an organic presence and sacrificing a paid presence, you are missing the boat on the most powerful advertising platform in the world. Hard stock. Are we clear? Now that being said, maintaining a presence on social media and organic presence, meaning organic, organic is that you go in, you post a picture or a video, you add a caption and you hit post. That is an organic post, right? Organic posts though are only seen by anywhere between three and five percent of your followers. And you can't guarantee that it's the followers in your market. For example, I follow hundreds and hundreds of restaurants not only around the country but all over the world. As you can imagine, there are hundreds of markets that I am not in. So when I see a post from a some restaurant in London or some restaurant in Italy or some restaurant in San Diego, I'm not going in for dinner tonight this weekend, this month, probably not even this year, right? That's just me, right? So when I see a post, I am not the target audience. If you think about using social media as an advertising platform, meaning trying to show your content to people who will become customers and that's very, very important to understand. If you want to reach people who can be customers tonight or this weekend or this month, that's what the paid tools are for. Now, that being said, what are the organic tools for? I like to think of them in this way. Organic social media is a customer acquisition tool. Organic social media is a retention tool. So you use the paid tools to reach new customers and to lure them in, persuade them to come in and have a dinner at your restaurant. You use the organic side as a retention tool to remind people who you are, why they would be interested in you, why they had such a good time, right? To bring them back. Almost everyone who is a follower of yours on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok knows your brand, right? They know your brand. They were interested enough to click follow. Many of them are already customers. They have been to your place or frequent your place regularly. For all intents purposes, when we think of the word follower, this is from my friend Rev Sancio, one of the smartest restaurant marketers I know. He's the one who co-hosted the P3 marketing summit just this past January in South Carolina. He co-hosted that with me and he says, every time you see the word follower in our industry, I want you to replace it in your mind with the word guest. Most of your followers are guests or prospective guests or soon to be guests, right? It is a retention tool. You are trying to stay top of mind for them with a couple of exceptions. Now, I want to bullet point these all really, really quickly because like I said, I don't want this episode to be very long. When we talk about organic social media, the first point I want you to make is that it is a retention tool because only 3 to 5% of your followers see your post. It's a pretty, it's a pretty good chance that no new people are going to see your content. If the content performs well, maybe they'll show it to more of your followers and maybe if it goes viral, then it will go to people who aren't your followers, but that is a rarity. I promise you, it is very, very rare. And if you try to game the system to come up with something viral, it just won't work. So our organic posting on social media is a retention tool. A very small percentage of our current followers will ever see that post and almost no one else will ever see that post. Now like I said, I'm not telling you that you don't need a presence. I think you do need to maintain a strong presence on those platforms. Now, don't bother being on all the platforms. Just pick a couple and do them well. This book and Instagram should absolutely be there if you want to do Twitter or X or whatever they call it as your third find. If you want to do YouTube as your third grade, if you want to do TikTok as your third grade, but I think for the most part, do three and do three really well. Now, when we talk about organic, each of the platforms operate differently, right? There are things you can do. You can include links on a Facebook post. You can't do that on an Instagram post. So there are things that you can post like reviews or mentions, impress articles. There are things you can post on Facebook like that that you wouldn't necessarily post on Instagram because you can't include the link. You can't send them to the thing that you want them to read, which would get them excited enough to come in and eat. Right? Meanwhile, Instagram is a much more visual medium. It's turning into a video and entertainment medium. Right? Facebook, you can too, but much more so on Instagram. I don't know why, that's just how people think of it. So again, the first point is that organic is about retention. Second point is that very few of your current followers will ever see your post. So almost no one else who doesn't follow you will ever see your post. That becomes really important. The crucial part about a feed is that you're maintaining what I like to call a lookbook. So that if somebody, and this is how it what happens, often how people land there, right? They hear about a restaurant, they go, they're talking to a friend and they say, no, we dined at restaurant X, Y and Z last night. So I don't know restaurant X, Y and Z. Oh, look it up, look it up. It's really great. I got to show you. And then what do you do? You take out your phone and you check out Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. And you go look at pictures and you scroll through. That is a crucial moment in the customer journey where they hear about a place and they immediately start learning more researching the place. Your social media feeds can be a very powerful capture point for a prospective consumer in that moment. So the feeds need to look great. They need to look on brand. They need to get people excited about a meal there or excited when you remind them of what a meal there was like. It needs to be very easy to navigate. It needs to have a link that's prominent or a link that links to a link tree with multiple links. Don't send people in a hundred different places. Be real, really clear about what you want them to do. If they land on your Instagram page, for example, and they're so excited by the content, what do you want them to do next? Usually it's order now or reserve a table. For most restaurants, it's one or the other. That's it. It's very, very rarely will be anything else. Maybe on a new restaurant, if you open up the feeds for the 90 days or six months before you open, maybe it's an email capture, right? Be the first to know when we begin taking reservations, sign up for our list. But usually you want to try to capture reservations or capture orders. Now, when I talk about the look book, I always talk about thinking in terms of content pillars. Most restaurant feeds need to have five content pillars. Most of them are the following. Food, beverage, the space, the people, and then a wild card, your fifth thing. So maybe that's giving. Maybe your particular restaurant promotes a lot of community events and charity, they donate a lot. Then that would be your fifth thing. Food, beverage, people, space, and charity. Maybe your neighborhood factors prominently into your restaurant. Certainly when I was working at Gotham Bar and Grill, they were in the heart of Greenwich Village. Greenwich Village is a big part of that restaurant's identity. Washington Square Park right down the street, Fifth Avenue right around the corner, Union Square, two blocks away. It's a prominent piece of their identity. So food, beverage, decor, people, neighborhood. That was their fifth thing, right? There are all different things that you can do as your fifth wild card, but for the most part, every restaurant's gonna have five content pillars, meaning every single thing that is posted is gonna fall into one or a couple of those five buckets. Now, maybe you have a chef demonstrating a new dish. That's food and people, right? That makes sense. Hopefully this is clear. Every piece of content you post should fit into one of your content pillars. For the most part, I would post, let's say, five times a week on Facebook, five times a week on Instagram. If you're gonna do TikTok, you really need consistently and it needs to be every single day or sometimes twice a day. I don't know why, except the quantity there, the frequency needs to ramp up. It's just what those algorithms are looking for at this moment. Consistency, you don't have to go overkill, but you do need to be consistent with the quantity, quality, and the cadence of your content. Again, just so you're putting your stuff out there, just so the feed changes little by little every day or every other day. You don't have to kill yourself or the whole bunch of stories. You don't have to kill yourself with highlights and all of that. Just post consistently to the feed. If you can do a story a day that I find is helpful, one of the things that again, Rev Siancio says, said post every other day and on the off days post a story, meaning post Monday to the feed, post Tuesday to the stories, post Wednesday to the feed, post Thursday to the stories. Now, that's one way of doing it. One of the things that I've heard is you can post less to the feed, let's say three times a week, but then do a story every single day. So that you always pop into the top of someone's Instagram when they log in. So they are always there at the top of the feed and I think there's value to that. Because what we're trying to do when we market, especially restaurants, is stay top of mind. There are different schools of thought here. There is no right. There's no wrong. I would say pick something and run with it. I would say test a couple of different strategies and see what works for you, for your market and your audience. Right? It's not this one size fits all. This is the gospel. This is how to do it. But I am giving you a couple of different ideas of how to do it. So you're going to post with some consistent sort of cadence. You're going to be consistent with the quality, with your content pillars, and every piece of content, I want you to remember this. Every piece of organic content should fit into what's called the ED model, E-D-I-E. It should educate, demonstrate, inspire, or entertain. Every piece of content you post needs to do one of those four things. So now there are some rules, right? We're talking about the content pillars. We talked about consistency with cadence, consistency of quality, and now we're talking about the ED principle. I didn't make it up. I heard it from somebody. I'm sure I heard it from somebody. It just makes good sense. Every piece of content should educate, demonstrate, inspire, or entertain. And yes, you better believe it. If it can do more than one at once, cool. There's nothing bad about that. Right? So think in terms of the lookbook. Think in terms of reminding your people, using the organic feeds as a retention tool to remind them to stay top of mind. Say you had a great time. Remember, don't you want to come back? That's how we should be using them. I don't think we should be running contests. I don't think we should be doing giveaways. I don't think there should be graphics. I think it should be pictures and videos. And if I'm really honest, four out of every five posts right now, this is in the year 2024, four out of every five posts should be video. Four out of five posts should be a real. So shot vertically and post it as a real. If I can be absolutely honest, that's what's working right now. Again, test it. Play with it. When it all possible, don't build something in Photoshop or Canva. Don't put a logo over it. Don't put a graphic. Don't put text over it unless you're building the text within the platform, within TikTok, within Facebook, within Instagram. Those are native to those platforms. Then find totally cool. But otherwise, don't do it. So don't put your logo in the bottom right corner. It looks cheesy. It doesn't work. I know why you did it so that if it gets shared, no matter who sees it, they see your logo and there's brand recognition. That's not how it works. That's how we utilize organic social media. We do not spend all of our marketing budget on an organic social media strategy. So now, episode 326, last week, we talked about a paid strategy, two tactics that when employed together, link up to create a strategy. And now we're talking about how we do organic. When we talk about organic, engagement is crucial. When somebody comments on your post, you need to comment back. The more comments that appear on a post, both other people's and your own comments, the more comments that appear, the more you will sort of, you'll sort of judge the algorithm. Somebody comments, you respond, they respond back. Somebody else responds to that person. Instagram goes, whoa, whoa, people really like this. They're engaging with this. There's a conversation going on and they'll show it to more people. [BLANK_AUDIO] you start broadening your audience. That's how you quote-unquote go viral. It's not that the picture the cheeseburger is so good that people just want to keep sharing it and then, you know, Instagram's going to show it to more people. There's a lot of good looking cheeseburgers on the internet just because you got a really beautiful shot that you like doesn't necessarily mean it's going to get out there. But when we talk about the engagement piece of this, when people post a photo of something from your restaurant, you got to go in and like it. You got to go in and comment on it. When somebody comments on your post, you've got to respond back to them and make sure you do it in a way that prompts further conversation. Don't end the conversation right there. Right? Good point, blah, blah, blah, blah. What else? Right? They're going to take a picture. This, you know, I love this picture. This is the best burger that I've ever had in New York City. Whoa, amazing. You're going to say, whoa, amazing. Thanks for the huge compliments. Just for your own record, who was in second place in third place? Right? Because maybe they're going to name them and tag them. And then you can respond again, like, whoa, we're in such good company. Like second place, you know, second place, your second place restaurant is one of our favorites and your third place restaurant. That chef actually used to work here or you're going to talk about it, right? The small community, even a big city is a small community. And if you can keep that beach ball up in the air, so to speak, it's going to be better for your numbers. One of the possible if you can use user generated content is this content that's created by your diners. They come in, they take a picture, they post it. See if you can share that either to your stories, right? Or ask if you can reshare that to your feed. Makes them feel good. Makes it feel like a lot of people are talking about you, which they are. And it saves you on having to create content. You get some more variety on your feeds. All of this is an important way to create a presence, an organic presence on social media. But it can't be at the detriment or by sacrificing a paid strategy. So right now, if you only have an organic strategy, I'm going to strongly urge you to rethink that. It's important. It is a piece of the puzzle, but it is not more important than paid. It is not more important than Google search ads. It is not more important than having a strong presence on Yelp and Google my business responding to all those reviews. It's not, it's just not as important. It's not as important as having a great website that's optimized for the thing you want people to do when they visit your website. Organic social media is actually pretty low on the totem pole. You got to have everything in order, but it's pretty low in the totem pole. It's an important thing to keep in mind. So if you're spending a hefty amount on that, or if that's the only thing you're spending money on, I'd ask you to rethink that. So that's it. Last week's episode 326 and today episode 328, there's sort of a one, two punch. We're talking all about social media in the year 2024. I hope you guys got some value from this. If you have any questions about this, by all means reach out chip at chipclose.com. That's CHIP K L O S E dot com. I answer each and every email that I get. And even now I get a lot, but I still answer each and everyone. I love connecting with all of you guys out there. Appreciate you being here every single week. I appreciate you giving your time here, because I know there's a lot of great, a lot of great podcasts out there. Appreciate you making this part of your week. Thank you very much. And I will see you next time. [Music] [Music]