Restaurant Hashtags: How To Use Hashtags for Restaurants
Your restaurant should be present on social media. But, even if you have social profiles for your restaurant business, are you using them effectively? Restaurant hashtags and food hashtags can help you reach a larger audience online, bringing new customers to your social media pages, website, and hopefully, to your restaurant to buy a meal!
Hashtags are frequently misused on social media, so the key is using the right hashtags in the right way. Different restaurants, bars, and other food places can benefit from different hashtags and different strategies. Find the best restaurant hashtags for your business and learn how to properly use them.
Best Hashtags for Restaurants
Every restaurant is unique, so the best hashtags for one restaurant may not work for another. When choosing hashtags to use, consider your specific restaurant, offerings, and the content you’re attaching the hashtag to.
Restaurant Hashtags
You can use basic hashtags like #restaurant, #bar, or #coffeeshop, but these may not add much appeal to your posts. Instead, think of what makes your restaurant unique and use those hashtags.
If your restaurant is vegan, vegetarian, or provides options for other dietary restrictions, use hashtags like #VeganRestaurant, #VeganLifestyle, #Vegan, #PlantBased, #PlantLife, and so on.
If your restaurant is an old-school Italian BYOB, use that information! Hashtags like #ItalianRestaurants have thousands of posts, which could lead to thousands of people seeing your content.
You can also use offerings specific to your restaurant, or related to the content you’re posting. If you’re sharing a post about your happy hour special, #HappyHour is an obvious choice. You can use other promotional hashtags like #DrinkSpecial, #LateNightFood, #OpenBar, and so on.
Food Hashtags
Use hashtags that are specific to the food you serve, or the food you’re posting about. You may be surprised to learn that popular food hashtags have huge audiences – for example, #Pizza has 44 million posts on Instagram, and #Sushi has 26.3 million.
If you serve a signature food or a signature style of food, use those hashtags to find people interested in what you serve. Everyone loves a good food picture, so attaching the matching hashtag to a gooey slice of pizza is sure to get some attention.
Aside from food specific hashtags, there are plenty of foodie hashtags that food fanatics follow religiously. Try some of the following popular food hashtags:
- #Foodie
- #Food
- #FoodPorn
- #Foodgasm
- #NomNom
- #FoodPhotography
- #Foodstagram
- #Tasty
- #EatingForTheInsta
- #Eats
- #ForkYeah
- #FoodFeed
- #DailyFoodFeed
- #InstaEats
- #GoodEats
- #FeedFeed
- #FoodIsLife
Location Hashtags
The point of using hashtags, and social media in general, is to improve visibility to bring more customers to your restaurant. What better customers to target than the ones in your immediate area?
Using location-based hashtags can bring the right audience to your social media. While someone halfway across the world may like your food photos, they aren’t likely to become paying customers. Use hashtags to put your restaurant in front of people in your local area who can actually visit your restaurant.
When choosing location hashtags, you can use the location itself like #Philadelphia, as well as location + food hashtags. Examples include #PhiladelphiaRestaurants, #PhillyEats, #PhillyFoods, and so on. Simply insert your location.
Some hashtags will be more popular than others, so search for hashtags that include your location to find the best ones. The more posts, the more people are likely to follow and see the hashtag that you use.
Branded Hashtags
Popular hashtags can get more eyes on your posts and hopefully improve visibility for your restaurant. Branded hashtags can also be useful though.
Branded hashtags are hashtags created by your restaurant for some specific purpose. For example, you could create a hashtag of your restaurant name and encourage customers to tag it in photos from their visit. This can help spread the word about your restaurant, as their followers may be interested in the food or other pictures they share and look into your restaurant. This also helps to collect user-generated content – if a customer takes a great food photo, you could ask to re-post it on your account.
Many brands also use hashtags to hold contests. For example, you could encourage customers to tag your hashtag in a post from your restaurant to be entered to win a free meal, a discount, or some other perk.
How Can Restaurants Benefit from Hashtags on Social Media?
Restaurants are typically on social media for a few reasons: first, most businesses are, so it’s a form of social proof that your restaurant is real. Second, it allows you to share more information and images from your brand, locking in your brand aesthetic so that customers know what you’re all about. And third, it is another marketing tool to help customers find your restaurant and learn more.
Hashtags are useful because they help your social media content get seen by a larger audience. When you post on social media sites like Instagram, only your followers will see it on its own. If you add a hashtag, however, anyone who follows that hashtag, likes similar content, or searches for the hashtag can see your post and engage with it.
Using hashtags can not only step up your social media game, but help improve brand visibility and bring new customers in your door. The key is using the right hashtags that match your restaurant. There are also certain best practices for hashtag use on social media.
Hashtag Best Practices
Hashtags can be used on all social platforms these days – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and even LinkedIn. For restaurants, we find that Instagram hashtags are the most effective.
On Instagram, you can use several hashtags to help your posts get seen. Using hashtags can put your content on the Instagram explore page, which can help thousands of more users find and learn about your establishment.
Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post, but some experts state that 11 is the best number. You can comment the hashtags on your own post, or hide them by spacing out your caption so that it looks less cluttered.
Twitter is where the hashtag originated, but they are much less common on the platform now. If your restaurant has a Twitter presence, you can still use hashtags – just stick to one or two at once. You can also leverage trending hashtags to join a popular conversation and get your name out there. For example, see how Wendy’s (a restaurant with a famously popular Twitter presence) uses the #Oscars hashtag to join the conversation:
Not saying eating our french fries gets you an #Oscar nomination but also…sup https://t.co/hTLDObYjgV
— Wendy’s (@Wendys) January 13, 2020
Facebook also allows hashtags, but again we’d recommend using only one or two relevant tags to get more eyes on your post.
Final Thoughts
Social media is a great, free marketing tool for your restaurant. Make the most of your social media efforts by using the best hashtags for restaurants. For more marketing help, contact Restaurant Clicks or download our free restaurant marketing plan!
The post Restaurant Hashtags: How To Use Hashtags for Restaurants appeared first on Restaurant Clicks.
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