Restaurant Social Media and Mobile Marketing

Over 95% of consumers are turning to the Internet to find local businesses and most of these consumers are searching from their smartphone. New restaurant customers searching the Internet are looking for the following information regarding restaurants:

Menu with Prices and Photos

Online Restaurant Reviews

Restaurant Address with Pictures

Online Promotions, Discounts and Special Offers

Restaurant Phone Number, Daily Hours and Reservation Info

It is extremely important that these smartphone visitors are accessing a mobile optimized website. What is a mobile optimized site? Here are just a few of the features that make your site mobile optimized:

Ability to Easily View the Website
Ability for One Button Tap to Call Ability
Ability to Connect to Online Reservations
Ability to Connect with Online Review Sites
Google Map with Online Directions

If your website is not mobile optimized these visitors will quickly move to a competitor’s website that is mobile optimized. This means you just lost a customer to a nearby competitor.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest are just a few of the very important sites that your restaurant should be active on. One social media site is not enough, your new customers use multiple sites. Your restaurant must have someone responsible for updating the social media sites and replying to relevant posts about your restaurant on a daily basis.

In addition to social media and mobile marketing, there are several restaurant review sites that are important to your restaurant. The biggest restaurant review site has over 132-million visitors per month and over 57-million reviews! Restaurateurs have a love/ hate relationship with these review sites. They love the great reviews and hate the bad ones. According to data evaluated from the Washington State Department of Revenue, a one-star increase in rating leads to a 5% to 9% increase in revenue, All reviews, good and bad, must be responded to by your social media person. The good review provides an opportunity to start a conversation with your happy guest and help them spread their good comments to one and all. The bad reviews are even more important, each of these must be addressed and all possible actions taken to satisfy this past guest. You can’t afford the effects of even a single negative review.

How important are these restaurant reviews to consumers? A recent survey showed that 88% of surveyed customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations and 85% of surveyed customers read up to ten reviews! And if that isn’t enough, Google uses the number of reviews a site has as part of their site ranking determination.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Bob_Frazier/1771424