Improve Your Bar’s Social Media Presence
Let’s face it, using social media as a business tool for your bar is challenging. New platforms are constantly being launched while the tried-and-trued sites are regularly changing their rules. Which ones – Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook – should you be using? How frequently should you be posting? What content should go up there? Here are some ideas to answer questions you may have and improve your social media presence at the same time.
Consistency
It can be tough to come up with quality content at a moment’s notice. So put yourself on a schedule. On Instagram, you want your content to fit the platform – 100% visual. Fuzzy photos from your phone are not recommended. Those little square images are a direct reflection of your bar after all. Think quality over quantity here and create a posting schedule that aligns with your available time. If the process of planning out, taking high quality photos and preparing them for use on Instagram seems monumental, post once a week. On the other hand, if you’ve got stacks of solid images just waiting to be unleashed, get on there every day. Whatever the timing, you want it to be realistic, so that you stick with it
Curate
The whole point of social media is to be social. When someone asks a question about what you just tapped, make sure you reply. Along with making it clear that there is a real person on the other end, you can gain important insight. If the latest Barrel Aged Bonanza is generating tons of likes and retweets, take the time to go deeper and find out why. Engaging folks on Twitter naturally keeps your bar on their radar which can lead to more customers walking through the door. You could just auto-share everything you put on Facebook and never bother to see what’s happening with those posts on Twitter. But customers that only use Twitter will quickly see there’s no one behind the wheel of your account. And just as quickly disengage.
This barely scratches the surface of the social media circus we’ve all come to recognize as an important part of business today. As a busy bar owner, the time needed to properly manage your social media accounts may not always be available at the end of the day. Another way to streamline this process is to use TapHunter. One of its features is social media content creation. When updating the tap list in TapHunter, your Facebook and Twitter accounts can automatically receive posts detailing the new brew. Making your life easier and freeing up time for important things, like socializing with your customers, in the real world.
Resources
A great tool to help with scheduling your social media posts is Buffer or Hootsuite. These sites allow you to link all your social media platforms in one place. You can log in on a weekly basis, add the content you want to post across your networks and set up a schedule for when they show up. Along with posting to your networks from a single location, you can engage your followers from one place. This saves you time from visiting each network – Facebook, Twitter, etc – individually to handle these activities.
