Our guide on how to set up a Restaurant Facebook Page shows you the step by step instructions for setting up your Restaurants page in Facebook in 2016.

In Restaurant Autopsy we discuss the negative impact a hacked website can have and just how quickly it can start to drive customers away.

We talk about how to set up a Restaurant Facebook Page.  We give you a complete step by step guide on how to get one set up right the first time.

We have also created a Youtube video, which also goes through the steps so you can see exactly what needs to be done.

Why set up a Restaurant Facebook Page?

There are a lot of good reasons to be using Facebook for your Restaurant.

1. It is one of the easiest social media tools to find more customers and turn them into repeat customers.  (along with Instagram!)
2. Facebook ads are very cost effective at driving revenue.
3. It enables you to remain top of mind with your existing customers.
4. It is Word of Mouth of steroids for your existing customers, making it a lot easier for them to give a good recommendation, simply by liking, tagging, posting, sharing or checking in.

Once you hit 25 likes, you will be able to claim your Restaurant’s Facebook Vanity URL.  currently Rooster Burgers is set to https://www.facebook.com/Rooster-Burgers-186004351766066/, which is pretty ugly and definitely not something you would want to advertise.  There is an option to get rid of the numbers at the end after you reach 25 likes.

Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.

Episode 15 – How to set up a Restaurant Facebook Page

 

James Eling: Hey, it’s James from Marketing4Restaurants and welcome to Secret Sauce, the restaurant marketing podcast. Episode 15, setting up a restaurant Facebook page.

James: Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. Today we’ve got a really interesting episode basically to help restaurant owners who have not taken that first step into social media and have not set up a restaurant Facebook page. Or, for those who’ve set it up but they’ve done it incorrectly, and they’re really struggling because of it. There’s a few really important things that you need to do when you set up your Facebook page. So, we’re going to cover off on a, basically, a best practice guide on how to set up your Facebook page. Now, we’re doing something a little bit different this time. What we’re actually going to do is put this up as YouTube video, as well. So, if you’re listening to this and you think, “Yes, I need to set up a Facebook page for my restaurant,” you’re going to be able to go in and watch this on YouTube and follow along so that you get an idea about exactly how to set it up, a step by step guide. We’re going to make it nice and simple for you.

This is a two-parter, so the second part, we’re going to skip the basics. We’ve talked about that a bit, so we may come back to it further down the track. But what I want to really hone in on is for those people who are doing a really good job of the basics of Facebook, where they’re going to come up with some of the strategies that we use in our business that are a little bit more advanced that people aren’t using on a day to day basis. Because I think that that is where the real power of Facebook comes out. And so, we want to go through those things for you and help you to understand how to use the really powerful mechanisms that there is behind Facebook’s database. Before we talk about that though, there’s a couple of things, I want to talk about a restaurant autopsy. So, Restaurant Autopsy, where we talk about a restaurant that’s failed.

Now, the restaurant that we’re going to talk about today is not a restaurant that’s failed, but I suspect that it’s dead man walking. Now, about five weeks ago I took my family out for a dinner on Sunday night to a hamburger place that we really love. They’ve been around for probably 25 years I reckon, maybe more. And the product that we buy from them is a little bit of nostalgia. The food’s really good, the kids love it there, but we buy a bit of nostalgia because we think about all of the good times that we’ve had at this place. Had a great meal. Once again though, so they don’t have a website and they were pretty quiet. Like, I think that the food there is really, really good, very reasonably priced, and it does offer something that, you know, that little bit of extra excitement, a bit of a great experience. And it was quiet, and I think, you know, not having a website, that’s one of the things that really doesn’t do them any favours.

But we’re not going to talk about them, because they seem to be doing alright and I think they’ve got a really strong local and repeat customer business. The restaurant next door to them, an Indian restaurant. And so, I work in restaurant marketing, I’m always looking for the quiet restaurant not the full one. The full one I want to know how they got full, the quiet one I’m always thinking about the things that we can do to help them become busier. So, we left probably about 7:30 at night and this place, and it’s a Sunday night so we’re not expecting it to be huge, but there were two people in the restaurant and there were two people serving. So, they probably had someone out in the kitchen, as well, so you got three people working for two people who are eating. That is not a winning combination. And I thought, “You know what, there might be something that we could do to help these guys.” So, I grabbed their, they had a menu out the front, you know, because they do takeaway. I thought, “Yup, fantastic. I’ll have a look at their website and, you know, we’ll see if there’s anything that we can do to help them because these guys probably need a lot of help.” And so, Monday, come into the office. I Google them and, yup, they’ve got a website, excellent.

And so, let’s just have a look at what their website looks like. So, we click through and, “Warning, visiting this website may harm your computer.” Now, that does not look good from a marketing point of view. So, I know that it’s the right website because Google’s told me and it’s got the name of the restaurant there. I’ve gone to click through, “Warning, visiting this website may harm your computer.” Now, so what’s happened is that Google has gone through and it’s found some malware which may potentially be harmful, a virus, or something that people are going to download when they go to that website. So, it’s trying to stop people from going there. Not good, not good at all. So, now I’m using Chrome. So, this has actually been stopped by Google.

So, anyone using any browser will find this when they Google the name of the restaurant. Let’s have a look, this is what it looks like in Firefox when you try to go there, “Reported attack page. This webpage at blah blah blah blah blah.com.au has been reported as an attack page, and has been blocked based on your security preferences. Attack pages try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damage your system.” So, this is really bad. Now, let’s have a look at what happens if you’re using Internet Explorer and, you know, actually some people do use Internet Explorer. Wow, it actually goes there. The website doesn’t come up. So, it does all look pretty ordinary.

Now, even worse, this is what it looks like on a mobile phone. So, when you Google it, this is what happens. And so, Google basically tells you the exact same. This is on an android phone. Tells you the exact same story, “Warning, visiting this website may harm your computer.” If you go into the website directly, you get the same warning that we got on the previous one. So, a large number of problems for this poor restaurant. Now, I reached out to them, I gave them a call and said, “Look, there’s some issues with your website.” And he said, “Is there?” And it’s like, “Yeah.” And he goes, “I’ll have to get someone to look at that.” And I said, “Look, no worries. Just FYI, we’re Australia’s largest restaurant marketing company. We build hundreds of restaurant websites. If you need a hand, we’re happy to.” And he goes, “Yeah, that’d be great. Send some information through.” So, I sent him some information through and that was five weeks ago. Now, the average restaurant website receives about 1,100 visits per month.

If these guys have an average restaurant, that’s 1,100 people who are seeing this page per month. Now, my question is how likely are you to come along to that restaurant after you’ve seen that? So, for starters, are they still open? Because, I mean, their website’s been hacked and, you know, it just looks like, I don’t know, maybe they’ve closed. I don’t know what their phone number is because I can’t find it on the website, because the website isn’t up. I don’t know, you know, if someone says, you know, “Go to this restaurant, it’s really great,” I don’t know what the address is. There are no details here. So, this has got to be causing them, I would have thought, upwards of $10,000 worth of loss revenue every month. Now, you can get away with that if you have an incredibly loyal number of customers who love the food that you provide.

Or, you have an incredibly creative walk-in strategy. So, you’ve got a lot of foot track coming by and you can drag all of these people in. They don’t care, they’re not even going to have a look at your website. They’ve gone by the restaurant and something’s caught their eye and they thought, “Wow, I’m going to eat in here.” These guys have none of that and that’s why at 7:30 on a Sunday night there are two people eating in there. So, how much longer are they going to be able to sustain those losses? So, just a really important point for everyone.

How to set up a restaurant Facebook page: Look at your website

Have a look at your website. I don’t think, when they said, “Is it?” I don’t even think, he didn’t sound that surprised. I think it’s just one of those things that he’s like, “Well, you know, it is what it is. It’s probably not that important.” But the scary thing is the number of people who are going to that website and seeing that message, you’ve got to thinking that’s got to be destroying business for them, destroying the value of their business. So, sad times for them. Just everyone, make sure that you’re having a look, make sure that your web developers making sure that whatever platform you’re on, you know, hopefully it’s WordPress because that’s nice and easy for you to be able to edit, whatever it is make sure that it’s patched so that you don’t run into problems like this.

So, that’s the end of the sad times. Let’s move onto something awesome and exciting, setting up your Facebook page. So, let’s get into actually creating the page for you. Now, one of the concerns I hear from a lot of restaurant owners is they want to try and keep their page separate to, their personal page, separate from the company page. And that’s completely fine. There’s a couple of tricks though that you can use. So, I’ve created a second account for me. So, I’ve got one, I manage multiple Facebook pages across our businesses. So, I want to create some separation between what it is I do personally and what I’m doing for work on Facebook. So, I’ve got a second account which I use to manage all of my Facebook pages.

So, that’s the first thing that you can do. It makes it a little bit difficult if you see something in your personal Facebook account that you think is good, you can’t actually share it onto a page that you manage. So, I have to actually share it to my other account, and from there I can share it onto that page.

The other thing that I think works really well is to make sure that you’re using multiple browsers. So, most of my work is done in Chrome. So, and I’m using Chrome here, Chrome is for work and I use Firefox for my personal account. That way there’s very little danger of me posting something that should go on a personal page or posting something that should go on one of the work accounts where I’ve posted something personally. So, they’re just a couple of the little tricks that I use to sort of keep those separated, and I know that a lot of restaurant owners are concerned about it, they don’t want, you know, pictures of their kids turning up on their page that they’re running for the restaurant. So, top right-hand corner, ‘create page’. Alright, so we’ve clicked ‘create page’ and you’ve now got a choice of what type of page you want to create.

For most of us, if it’s a single location restaurant, then you’re going to click local business or place. If it’s a chain, then potentially brand or product, or company or organization. But we’re really concerned about, you know, single location restaurants. So, for everyone it’s going to be local business or place. Now, this is really important because one of the big mistakes that I see a lot of people doing is actually creating a Facebook account, which Facebook think is a person. Now, the good thing about that is that you can be friends with people, with your customers, and you actually get a lot more traction as a friend than you do as a business. The downside of that though is that it makes it a lot harder for people to interact with you because they need to be your friend, depending on how your privacy settings are. And the critical thing that you cannot do if you have a Facebook account as opposed to a page is you can’t run marketing. And if you can’t run marketing then it’s literally is pretty pointless, because you’re only going to be interacting with people who actually know about your restaurant. So, let’s just click on ‘local business or place’. And so, let’s choose a category.

No surprises what we’re going to put in here and now, I’m actually creating this for one of our test sites. So, we’ve got a test site for a business that’s called Rooster Burgers and the website there is melbournesbestburgers, and you can see the little bit of thinking about the SEO come into that. So, Rooster Burgers, and street address. Now, this is actually a fake restaurant, so we’ll be a little bit hazy about it. And if you actually go and have a look at the website you’ll see how bad it is and that’s because we don’t want people trying to find the website.

Get started. Now, so what category are we? Burger restaurant. Now, add a few sentences to tell people what your page is about, so it’s obviously about your restaurant. This is the kind of place where you want to put in your unique selling proposition, okay? So, you do have one of those I’m assuming, you’ve got your USP all sorted away. That’s why people come to you, because you are the number one in this category, you offer something. There’s something that puts you apart from everyone else. In this day and age, it really is a struggle if you’re just another Indian restaurant, if you’re just another Chinese restaurant, if you’re just another burger bar. Melbourne’s Best Burgers specializing and so, in our marketing plan for this fake restaurant we settled on organic chicken, which we deliver within the CBD during lunch for accountants, lawyers, and stockbrokers. Now, I’ve runout of space.

Now, I’m not going to massage that too much, but what we thought about with this business is that we would use guys and girls on bikes riding around delivering these burgers to people like stockbrokers, lawyers, and accountants. Why those guys? Because they charge by the hour, or a stockbroker, you know, they’re making a lot of money all of the time. If they take time out of the office it’s costing them a fortune. So, we could charge a premium for our price because we were actually going to deliver it to their workplace. And when we first came up with this idea we created a website that looked, it was pretty close to what we would do for one of our customers, and within a week we had someone who had spent an hour going around the office and had an order of 20 burgers that they wanted delivered. And she said, “Your kidding me, this is a fake restaurant. That’s so unfair.” So, we know that that’s a great little strategy, but that’s the kind of thinking that you want to be coming up with when you’re thinking about your USP, you know. Really trying to get into the mind of your customer.

Melbournesbestburgers.com.au. Is it a real established business? I’m going to tick yes, now we’re going to delete this page once it’s gone live. And so, am I authorized to be the official representative of this establishment? Yes. Save info. Profile picture. Upload. And you can see, now so obviously this is, I gave this to one of our graphic designers and I said, “I want you to spend about two minutes on this, because it’s a fake Facebook page and it won’t actually be going live.” So, a very poor logo there. Click next. Add to favourites, which just means that on the left-hand side when you login to your account you’ll be able to see it. And next. Now, preferred page audience, “Tell us about the people you’d most like to connect with. Anyone can find your page, but we’ll do our best to put in front of people who matter to you most.” So, Melbourne. And we want to really narrow that down because of the fact that we are, we deliver by bike. Now, obviously people can come up and in our business plan we were only operating at lunch time with a plan to potentially add one more sitting and that would have been breakfast, okay. Because one of the interesting things is that businesses that don’t do dinner are worth more.

So, if you can be profitable and not do dinner, you’re worth a lot more because it’s more of a lifestyle so people are going get up early, they’re going to cook breaky, they’re going to cook lunch, and then they’re going to go home. And, more importantly, got the weekends off. Hey, how good’s that? So, interests. Stockbroker, accountant, and who else did we say? Lawyers. Now, I would suggest that you spend a lot more time thinking about this and putting, you know, a lot more interesting things in there. You can start, if you’re doing delivery, you may want to target, you know, single men aged 18 to 25 who are living alone. Those guys are potentially just eating, you know, cheese toasties seven nights of a week. So, when you pop up a Facebook ad for a, you know, delicious gourmet delivered meal they’re much more likely to take that up and we’ve seen some people who have had some really good success with that.

So, we hit save and Facebook comes up with a nice little tour, show support for the work you’ve done by liking it. Okay, we can like the page. So, this account doesn’t have any friends because it’s not my personal account, but what I can do is if I log into my personal account I can invite people to like this page. And I think that it’s always important that you try and do that. You want to try and get a couple of hundred likes. If you’ve got 15 likes on your Facebook page, then you’ve probably got 15 staff, and if you’ve got more than 15 staff then not even all of your staff like your Facebook page. So, you want to get out and it’s always the number of people who you’ve got liking your page, you can do some of the best social media marketing in the world if you’ve only got five people and you’re not going to run an ad then it’s just going to be tumbleweeds. You’re not going to get any interaction whatsoever. So, if this was a real account, we’d definitely look at inviting friends and I would invite my friends to invite their friends because, you know, they’re my friends and they obviously want to see me be successful.

So, the more people who like the page, the better. Email contacts. Next. And so, there we go. Now, add a cover. So, you can see there, that’s a picture of a slightly sick looking rooster. Now, there’s a few things here that we can do. We can add ours. So, for us we would be open from, say 10 am to 2 pm. Monday to Friday, 10 ‘til 2, quite civilized hours I think. Impressum, that’s like a legal notice that you may or may not have. A long description, this is where, you know, I’d really put in where we source our food from, all of the great things about us, and, of course, the delivery. I’d be explicit here about the places that we offer delivery to. So, save changes. Price range, and it’s interesting they don’t actually give a dollar value there. So, you know, obviously that’s an area that you can have a bit of confusion. So, we do, let’s decide to go with breakfast.

Now, obviously we’re going to do lunch, that’s our main thing. What else have we got? Burgers and it doesn’t have lunch, well, I suppose it’s not really a separate cuisine. Now, we do have a vegetarian option, so I will put that in. Nothing else is jumping out at me. I could put ‘American’ in, it’s burgers. And there’s vegan, as well, we might want to put that in. I’ve just made that up. It should be tram. We can put details in of the general manager, attire, payment methods, that’s an important one. Visa Mastercard, cash is old favourite, and in Australia we don’t have discover cards, so skip that. I think the more information that you can give Facebook, the better that you’re going to be. So, we don’t take reservations, walk ins are welcome, good for kids. Delivery, that’s important. Catering, of course. Takeout, and we don’t have any outdoor seating. So, great for groups. Put our email address in, there’s the website. That is now, create a call for action. That’s probably something else we want to do. So, contact us. We don’t have an app. This gives you an idea of what it’s going to look like on the three platforms. So, the website, and that’s the Facebook website, iPhone, and android.

Now, that is pretty much good to go. There’ll be a few more things that you want to start doing and, of course, really, it’s about content creation and I like to, I like to pre-prime a Facebook page with some great content. Because I don’t want to go driving people and then they see that this is the first post that we’ve put up. So, I would be doing the simple things, food across the pass as it comes out, nice bright lights, get your phone out.

How to set up a restaurant Facebook page: Use Pages Manager

You should be using Pages Manager to manage your Facebook page. So, that’s available on iPhone and android. So, just go into the respective stores and download Pages Manager from Facebook. That allows you to, when people message you, you can get back to them really quickly which we see as an important thing with Facebook. Also, you can take a photo and you can put it up on Facebook very, very quickly. And I think that’s really one of the most important things that people need to get into their daily routine. Both for you as an owner of the business, as well as trying to get some of the staff going to do this, as well. In the kitchen think about the produce that’s coming in. Have you just got a whole pig that’s come in that you’re going to do nose to tail with? Let’s take a photo of that. Have you just got a massive slab of salmon? Or, is there a whole heap of fresh produce? Do you have a garden? Are you going out there? Is the chef going out to meet with a local farmer about his meat? Are you going out to an abattoir? Take photos of that sort of thing, because that helps build that story.

And it’s really easy with Pages Manager, just a quick click. You’ve got the photo, you’ve uploaded it, and there it is done and dusted. Pages Manager, that’s one thing that you should be doing. Now, the other thing that I think Pages Manager is really important for is, so you’ve got the food and you’re trying to tell your story, and they should work well. If you don’t have a signature item that works really well on Facebook, then you need to start thinking about getting a signature item that works really well on Facebook. Because there’s a lot of people who are crushing it on Facebook and on Instagram, and in a later episode we’re going to talk about how to link your Instagram into Facebook. I actually do, some of my work now starts in Instagram and then goes into Facebook.

Because they’re both owned by the same company, the integration is almost seamless. So, if you’re doing Instagram work and link it to Facebook, you’re getting Facebook social media for free and you just got to do the work of Instagram.

How to set up a restaurant Facebook page: Take photos of people

The other component that you want to do is take photos of people. So, if you’ve got a big group in and they’re having a great time, take a photo of them as they’re enjoying themselves, say, you know, of course, “You know, such a beautiful group of people here. Do you might if I take a quick photo for our Facebook page and show everyone what a great time that you’re having?” Take that photo and there’s a couple of things that, to make this work, there’s a couple of things that you got to do. One, ask permission, that’s always a good thing to do.

Secondly, upload there and then, alright. And you can see the importance of Pagers Manager now, because I want to do it right now. Everyone is still in the restaurant, everyone’s still having a great time. I want to do it now. So, you put that up, then you need to close the loop. Come back and say, “Thank you very much, I’ve just popped that on Facebook.” And you might even show them, because I know that there’ll be people in that group who will go and start tagging people in. And if you’ve got a party of 20 people there and 10 people tag themselves in, you’ve already started to go viral. Because each of those people who tag themselves in, it’s going to come up on their timeline. People are going to see they’re out at this restaurant.

And the way that social groups work, there’ll often be two or three people who are tagged in at that place who will know people in common. And it’s, “Wow, these three people are at the restaurant. That’s a place that I should probably go to.” They then go to the Facebook page of the restaurant, they see the awesome food, and it’s like, “I can see why all of my friends are going to this place. This is a restaurant that I would want to go to.” So, make sure you got food over the pass, tell the story, and lastly, photos of people enjoying themselves in your restaurant. That is pretty much your basic Facebook strategy good to go for your restaurant. So, we’ll leave it there.

Hopefully there’s enough there for you to be able to get a Facebook page up and running. Of course, if you’ve got any problems, send us a question on Facebook or more customers at marketing4restaurants.com. The next one that we’re going to do, we’re going to look at some of the advanced Facebook marketing strategies. These are the ones that a lot of people are asking about and these are the ones that we see a lot of people really doing an amazing job with. I find it to be a lot cheaper than some of the other online marketing methods out there. So, it should be a pretty good experience. So, thanks a lot. Hopefully it’s going to be a busy night in your restaurant tonight. Bye.

 

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