Instagram. Social media. Is your restaurant fully optimized to enable your customers to show how much they love your food, restaurant, concept and staff? If your goal is to build a base of loyal, repeat customers, you want to do everything possible to encourage fans of your business to tell their friends and family and world about your restaurant. The best form of publicity has long been word-of-mouth recommendations. These days, sharing photos on social media platforms is the best form of organic, word-of-mouth advertising.
Is your restaurant’s physical space optimized for customers taking photos? Is your restaurant adequately lighted, or, is it dark to create some kind of “mood”? Are your windows open to outside during the day or are the windows shuttered or blacked out entirely? Are your tables, place settings, and dinnerware conducive to people taking pictures?
You are probably familiar with restaurants which have their windows blacked out and ones with no outdoor windows at all. Of course, a restaurant might be located inside a bigger building, like a mall, so outside lighting via windows isn’t available. For many years, restaurants blocked outside light to create a mood in the restaurant. But in this era, if you have windows and daylight hours, it’s important to put that natural light to work for you.
Lighting inside your restaurant is critical too. While it’s expensive to remodel and install the latest lighting fixtures and systems, if you are remodeling, make sure you are keeping social media sharing in mind.
It’s not necessary to have bright lighting, as most cell phone cameras can take awesome pics without a flash and even in low light. But don’t make things darker (unless you have the romantic dinner thing going).
Social media friendly lighting in restaurants is also about colors, textures, patterns, and materials. Do the colors in your restaurant photograph well with your food, the plates, the table surfaces and backgrounds? Are the colors and decor presenting your concept in a photogenic way? Does the restaurant have interesting characteristics that people will find worth sharing on social media? Interesting pictures? Old signs? Traditional cultural objects?
Does your restaurant’s tables have interesting colors and textures that photograph well with your food? This may seem like a silly detail, but word-of-mouth sharing on social media is trusted more by potential diners than advertising or Yelp reviews. People trust what their friends and family are excited about. You want to cultivate fans, who become frequent diners, not somebody just trying your restaurant out one time for some cheap deal.
And have fun! Take your own pictures and share them!
