Harness the Power Of Instagram For Your Restaurant

Is your restaurant on Instagram? If the answer is no, what is holding you back? Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms and has an incredibly large audience on the platform with around 2 billion monthly active users.

This large audience makes it an essential social media marketing tool to build brand awareness and a loyal following of customers. By harnessing the power of Instagram for your restaurant, you’re sure to get your business more discoverability to generate more profits. 

What is Instagram & Why is it Important?

Instagram is a free tool many businesses use for marketing to promote and grow their business. You can download the app for free to share images, videos, and resources their audience may find valuable or entertaining. Each user can choose to have a personal or business account. With a business account, you get certain perks such as account analytics. As a restaurant, you will want to be utilizing it as a business account.

How to Use Instagram for Your Restaurant

The number one step in running an Instagram page for your restaurant, or any business, is to develop a good strategic approach. Everything down to the content you make, to who you engage with. Here are some tips on how to harness the power of Instagram from your restaurant.

Creating Strategic Content

There’s a lot of ways to create content on Instagram and a lot to keep in mind while doing so. Here are some ways to create content on Instagram that will help grow your business.  

• Create stories – Stories are a way to share vertical photos or videos that are only viewable for 24 hours unless highlighted. Stories have about 500 million people watching and creating them, so they get a lot of traffic and are perfect for promoting your restaurant. Feature your food, your staff, your events, sales and more in full screen, vertical format. You can also add links that direct to your website, and stickers including polls and countdowns to improve community engagement and learn about your audience.


• Create story highlights – Story highlights are essentially folders that store the story posts you shared without them disappearing after 24 hours. These are kept at the top of your profile and you can create categories to organize them. You could even designate one to pictures of all the food on your menu and utilize it as a digital menu for your Instagram. This feature is a great way for people to learn about your business quickly without doing deep research.


• Celebrate national food holidays – Did you know that there are national food holidays for nearly every day of the year?  These are prime days for posting food you serve that is related to that day. For example, if you have a delicious burger on your menu, be sure to post a photo of it on National Burger Day.  And don’t forget to use a hashtag!


• Creating reels – Instagram’s algorithm currently favors reels over anything else. Reels are short form videos that people can scroll through a feed and watch from all different creators. It offers a lot of discoverability and thus can help you build a customer base if one of your reels takes off. Reels should start with a visually appealing clip or audio to grab everyone’s attention within the first few seconds of the video to help potentially increase the amount of people who see your reel.


• Recycle content – Growing any social media platform is no easy task and can feel exhausting when trying to make something new everyday for every platform. You don’t have to always make something new though. Instead, you can recycle content to cross promote on your other platforms. A great rule of thumb with social media is don’t assume your following follows you on all your platforms. Thus you can repurpose content from Instagram or Twitter and promote it on the other page as well. This way you can also have the potential to promote your Instagram on other sites too by using content from it elsewhere. By using your analytics, you will be able to understand what content performs well and would be good to repurpose. 

Set Up a Business Account

Since your restaurant is a business, you should set up your Instagram page as a business one. Doing this will help get your account recognized as a legitimate business and give you access to all sorts of helpful tools. This includes adding contact information, your address, promoting posts and adding shopping right into your Instagram page. Instagram business accounts are free and easy to set up, so there’s no reason to skip this and miss out on all those perks. 

To set up a business account, you will need to connect a Facebook page to your Instagram page. The two being integrated opens a door to scheduling posts and allowing one post to go to both platforms at the same time. One thing to keep in mind when creating your account is keywords. Your audience should be able to easily find your page by searching your business name or keywords such as “Chicago Pizza.” Including keywords in your bio and headline will be helpful.

Use Hashtags

Embrace the power of the hashtag (a word or phrase that has the “hash” sign / # in front of it). Hashtags are social media’s search engine. If people want to see pictures of pizza, they’ll search the platform for #pizza. But don’t stop there. There’s no problem using multiple hashtags for your image. It is important to find the best Instagram hashtags for restaurants to increase your discoverability. There are a variety of resources and tools out there to help you find the best hashtags to use. You can use these tools to find relevant hashtags to your post as well as trending hashtags to boost your post. 

Pay Attention to When and What You’re Posting

Instagram comes equipped with incredible analytic tools. Use them to your advantage and pay attention to when your audience is on and scrolling through Instagram and what content performs well. This way you can create content based on what your audience enjoys and plan posting times to fit with when they are online to see your content. 

Be sure to have fun with it! Instagram is a fun social channel, so make sure your photos and videos reflect that. After all, would you want to eat at a restaurant that looks boring?