Why Photos
Photographs are like the main diet of social media. Text is too dry, videos may be to rich, photos are the perfect piece of content to consume. It’s visual, attention grabbing and has enough to move a person. Photos do very well on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By adding a photo to your tweet, it can boosts the retweets by 35% and photos accounted for 75% of content posted by Facebook pages worldwide alone. By constantly updating your library of photographs, you will have no issues in finding visual content to put into your website or blog.
Photos, especially with humans in them, are more likely to be noticed especially when people are scrolling through their feed on mobile with lightning speed. After all, they say a picture is worth a thousand words.
What kinds of pictures to put out there?
1: Pictures of people eating.
If someone hangs out on Facebook or Instagram, chances are they love to take photos and post them there. Of course there’ll always be the odd one out, the stalker… but we’re not talking about them.
For those who are familiar with the native app and the culture surrounding it, they’ll be using hashtags (especially for Instagram) and tagging people and places (more for Facebook – although there are lots of overlaps in functionality in both platforms)
Take advantage of these hashtags and tags. Keep checking when people tag or put your brand as a hashtag, and respond to them. The least you can do is to like that photo. Better – drop a nice comment. This shows that you’re listening and engaging with your audience.
Another way to use photos is to ask your diners or customers if you can snap a pic of them for your Instagram feed. They may feel honoured to be featured but this is probably the case when you’re a well known brand. Otherwise, they may be shy or dislike the attention. If that’s the case, reassure them but do not force.
It’s also worth mentioning that you should target the types of customers that you want. If you’re primarily a family oriented place, then more photos of families. If you welcome hipsters, post their pictures. Don’t attract the wrong crowd.
Basically, if you have some photos of your customers or if customers are taking photos and tagging your business, then it shows that you are getting lots of traffic – which means you are successful and commands trust.
2: Food Porn!
Research has shown that looking at food increases the appetite. In fact, a whole set of channels have been built on this fact. e.g. food network, Discovery’s TLC, Asian Food Channel, Nat Geo People etc. Not to mention those independent food review channels on social media. There’s also this crazy thing in Japan where people watch certain internet celebrities eat their meals.
Artistic photography can help your food look a certain way that appeals to your demographic. Not everyone digs the McDonald’s and fast food advertisement style photos – where there’s lots of mouth watering details in the shot. It’s quite common knowledge that they’re often edited in photoshop, or rearranged to look succulent and fulfilling. The trend these days is that people love the genuine-ness of food photography. You can capture the authenticity of a dish, but present it artistically. Check out @JASZMURKA on Instagram to see what I mean. Lovely concept.
What would be even more awesome is if you can start a new trend in food photography!
3: Staff Stories
The main purpose of these kinds of pictures is to promote your culture and experience in running the restaurant or F&B business. It might be a good idea to have your key staff to be featured on your photo platforms.
For example, you can take a shot of your chef at work, smiling over the food he’s preparing – showing great care and love being put into the craft. You can also take candid shots of your staff, promoting great culture. The message you want to portray is you have happy workers. Good businesses have happy workers.
4: Repackage content
Don’t duplicate posts for the sake of outreach. Avoid posting the same picture on Facebook and Instagram. Chances are, your fans follow you on multiple platforms. If you duplicate posts, then you are making them see the same picture and going through a very repeated experience.
You should ideally repurpose the photo. Use filters and go artistic on Instagram, but go honest up front shots for Facebook. You can use photos as backdrop for quotes or micrographics and statistics. Back up the photo post with a unique story on Instagram and Facebook platforms.
Don’t forget to use the 20% text rule if you plan to boost your post on Facebook.
