5 Mistakes Food & Beverage Companies Make on Social Media

Whether you own a restaurant, a brewery, take out spot, or a food and beverage company of any other kind, there’s a lot of mistakes you might be making on social media that I want to help you out with.

Don’t worry! They’re all fairly easy to remedy; but it does involve some intentionality on your end.

Ready to put in the work?

Here are the top 5 mistakes food and beverage companies make on social media:

1. Posting unappetizing photos

This is #1 because it’s probably the #1 problem I see. Especially if you are running your social media yourself (no shame), there’s a good chance the photos you’re posting are average-at-best, and gross-at-worst.

I won’t lecture you about the power of good photography, but understand that you can do some damage to your restaurant if you aren’t careful.

My quick tips if you’re taking food photos by yourself: Bring the meal near some window light, use a simple dish to shoot it on, maybe add in some cutlery / napkin / coaster, and add in a colourful drink where you can. Shoot from a million different angles, flip through your phone, delete everything that sucks, keep the best.

If your photos don’t make your customers’ mouths water, you’re probably missing the mark. I’d highly encourage you to watch a few videos on Youtube or, yes, consider hiring a professional to help you out.

You might be leaving money on the table.

2. Being way too formal

Even if you’re a high-end restaurant (and I mean really high end), the day of being formal in public is dead. People don’t wear suits to work anymore like it’s the 1920s.

Why do so many restaurant posts feel like the equivalent of wearing a suit?

I digress, but the point is: you will gain so much more organic interaction on your posts by posting like a human being. Use emojis, make jokes, post memes, whatever. Stop sounding so formal. This isn’t a courtroom: it’s a restaurant.

3. Not focusing on your unique sells

What do you do better than everyone else? Don’t be humble: what are you best at? What dish do customers always moan and rave about when they eat?

That’s the thing you should be promoting more than ever.

Take the things you do best and make them the #1 reason customers choose you.

If your menu is (admittedly) a little generic, do what you can to spice it up, or even just garnish a dish in a unique and memorable way.

You don’t want to be a dime-a-dozen restaurant. You want to stand out from the crowd. Your social media should be a stepping stone to getting you there.

4. Not showing enough variety

That being said, if you’re only ever showing off the same 3-4 meals, you might be missing on some opportunities.

Social media is a great tool to promote your best sellers. But:

Social media is also an opportunity to shine a light on lesser-known items on your menu.

If your social media feed feels to repetitive, you’re going to lose people by not seeming interesting enough to be worthy of a follow.

If you’re following #5 below, there should be plenty of opportunity to showcase your entire menu at some point.

5. Posting inconsistently

Posting once in a while is not a social media strategy. Posting daily for a week straight then ignoring your social media for the remaining 3 weeks is not a strategy.

Especially in the food and beverage industry, it’s imperative that you post consistently.

I would advise a minimum of 3-4 times a week, but you can also post 6-7 times a week if you can make the time to do so.

I’ll give you a bit of a break: for restaurants, it’s not imperative you have an entire social media strategy that is as involved as some massive marketing agencies might have you believe.

I’ve got a pretty detailed breakdown of my social media strategy for restaurants that you can check out, but I will tell you that—again, especially if you’re DIYing—starting by posting regularly is the best place for you to start.

In conclusion:

All of these mistakes can be fixed fairly easily, and the most difficult aspect of them is time. Not only do you need to take the time to analyze your menu as you go about these things, you also need to take the time to actually execute on fixing the mistakes you might be making.

I don’t want to turn this into a sales pitch, so I’ll just say this is exactly what I do, and why so many small businesses sub out their marketing to me. But I digress.

You can do a lot of this on your own if money is tight and you have the forward thinking involved in it.

Of course, there are plenty of things I can’t teach you—not for a lack of trying, but because you can only learn some of what I intrinsically know after years of doing this with all kinds of different businesses.

You have an opportunity to be better than you were yesterday.

Take it! The world is your oyster.