It’s interesting in this era of social media that you will still hear hospitality based business owners saying that social media is a fad or that and it isn’t useful for them as a marketing tool. That is crazy.

Saying that Facebook can’t help you market your bar or restaurant or hotel or night club should be reserved only for people that have more business than they can handle every day. There are very few of those businesses in the world. Funny thing, those places have active Facebook pages.

Most hospitality businesses do use Facebook one way or another. Most of them have a page of some type, and put a picture or logo on it. They even update it sometimes with menu offerings or promotions and “that” is about the extent of it for “most bars and restaurants.”

Some establishments go a bit further and make it active. They run surveys on menu items or entertainment they want to hire. They respond to comments on their pages. They run Facebook contests, like post your greatest moment at ” whatever their name is” and we will choose the top 3 and give them all a free meal/ drink/ t-shirt…. or whatever.

Some establishments go even further, and use their Facebook community to increase their sales. They issue Facebook Friend Coupons, or they run ads like “our next 10 friends to walk in and show this to the bartender get a 2 for 1 cocktail.”
Also, a “free dessert for any one who comes in tonight and shows this message/ post to their server.” These restaurants/ bars reach out and dial up their customers.

So the next question is, ” How do I have time to do all this, I’m trying to run a business.” Okay so without giving anybody the ” How do you NOT have time for this, it’s how you make a living speech” Here are my low cost /no cost suggestions for what to do.

You can either do this yourself or hire somebody to spend at least 2 hours 3 times a week taking care of it for you. I did this in one restaurant I managed and it worked out great. I had a waitress who would come in 2 hours early 3 times a week before the dinner shift and I paid her $10 an hour to answer comments, initiate campaigns, and give me reports on activity. Totally worth it! In 6 months, I had a dial-up customer base of over 1000 loyal restaurant fans that were actively engaged in my little Facebook community.

Here is what you need to do to get started. The bare minimum.

Go here and watch this guy’s videos, they are great and will show you how to do the basics step by step. You need to set this up if you haven’t yet. Business Page ( Mandatory) and Landing Page (optional but helpful).

Make signs with your new page’s address and start asking people that come in to sign up. If you have a bunch of regulars, then it should be pretty easy.

Once you have some people that like you ask them to ask their friends to like you too.

Run a promotion once you have 200 or so followers.

Use a restaurant or bar marketing calendar to help schedule Facebook promotions.

Be persistent and stay active regularly.

Well to sum the whole thing up. Facebook is a valuable marketing tool, that can help you build a vibrant and interactive customer base. Using Facebook today is as vital as a yellow pages listing was 20 + years ago. Please, consider this as well, if you are reading this and feel that you know a bar manager or restaurant owner that needs to know this please pass this along.

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