Leveraging your social media presence to bring traffic to your restaurant is far from a new idea. However, social media marketing for restaurants can sometimes begin to feel a bit stale. If you’re bored with posting the same types of images and content week in and week out, it may be time to spice things up a bit! Social media giveaways are a great way for restaurants to make a big impact. In today’s post, we’ll give you our top tips and tricks for hosting a successful social media giveaway that your customers will love.
How to Host a Social Media Giveaway
Luckily, hosting a social media giveaway for your restaurant is pretty simple. However, there are some important steps that you need to take in order to ensure that your giveaway is successful. A successful giveaway not only awards one or multiple of your customers with a fantastic prize. A successful restaurant social media giveaway also gets the word out about your business and draws in new customers, too.
Make the Rules Clear
Nobody will enter your giveaway if the rules to enter are confusing or unclear. As a general rule of thumb, don’t make things more complicated than they need to be! Keeping the rules simple helps to ensure that the highest amount of customers will enter your giveaway.
Here are some example rules or guidelines for entering giveaways that we’ve found to work well in the past:
- Ask customers to tag a friend in the comments of your post for an entry in your giveaway.
- Have customers to share the giveaway post for an entry.
- Ask customers to comment their favorite thing about your restaurant for an entry. This works well when your giveaway is mainly appealing to existing fans–for instance, a giveaway of restaurant merch, like tee shirts or mugs.
- Ask customers to follow your page as one part of their giveaway entry. This helps your page grow and gain more organic traffic that can lead to new customers.
Use Eye-Catching Graphics to Promote Your Giveaway
Posting about your giveaway in effective ways to get the word out is essential. Your giveaway announcement post shouldn’t be something that people can just easily scroll past without noticing! You don’t need to be a graphic designer to create an eye-catching post. Sites like Canva can help anyone create an effective and professional graphic. Include all the important information and guidelines in the image itself so that it can be easily shared.
What are Some Good Prizes for Social Media Giveaways?
Coming up with the prize for your social media giveaway is tricky because there are so many great options and possibilities! From gift cards to tee shirts to free entrees, there are so many different directions you can take with a social media giveaway. One tip we have is to keep your goal in mind. If you’re looking to draw in and appeal to new customers, choose a gift card or entree giveaway. But if you want to strengthen the community of fans and loyal customers your restaurant has, tee shirts, mugs, and other merchandise are great options.
We hope that these tips are helpful to you as you work to plan your next restaurant social media giveaway! Best of luck!
