Social media for cafes, pubs and restaurants

A hospitality account has one job that most other businesses don’t: it has to make someone decide where to eat tonight. Brand awareness is nice. A booking for six on Friday is better.

That changes what you post. Pretty flat lays of a latte every morning don’t move anyone. “Tuesday is $20 schnitzel and the footy’s on” does. The venues we see doing well on social treat their feed like a noticeboard with good photos, not a mood board.

What fills tables

Across the pubs, cafes and restaurants we work with, five kinds of post do nearly all the work.

Specials with a reason to come now. A special is only useful if people see it before they’ve made plans. Post weeknight specials by early afternoon, weekend ones by Thursday. Say the price, the day and the time. “Steak night” is vague; “Wednesday steak night, 300g rump with chips and salad, $28, from 5.30” is a decision.

Events. Live music, trivia, the footy, a long lunch, a winemaker dinner. Post the announcement a week or two out, a reminder the day before, and something from the night itself. That last one is the one people skip, and it’s the one that sells the next event, because it proves the room was full and fun.

Staff. People like knowing who’s cooking and who’s pouring. A 20-second video of the chef plating the new dish, or the bar manager explaining a cocktail, gets more genuine interest than any amount of polished food photography. Ask before you film anyone, and don’t make it compulsory.

Regulars and the room. A full room is social proof. Wide shots of a busy Friday, the beer garden in the sun, the high chairs lined up for Sunday lunch. Get permission before featuring identifiable customers, and see our guide to reposting customer content for how.

The food, done properly. Which deserves its own section.

Food photos that make people book

Your phone is good enough. The problem is almost never the camera. It’s the light and the angle.

• Shoot near a window, never under the pass. Kitchen lights are harsh and often coloured. Take the plate to the brightest table with daylight from the side.
• Turn the flash off. Always.
• Pick the angle the dish was designed for. Pizza, bowls and share platters look best straight down. Burgers, stacks and drinks look best from the side at plate height. Steak and pasta usually sit in between, about 45 degrees.
• Get closer than feels natural. Fill the frame with the food. Nobody needs to see the salt shaker and the dirty napkin at the edge.
• Shoot it hot. Melted cheese, steam, a sauce that’s still glossy. Plate it for the camera, shoot for 60 seconds, then send it out or eat it.
• Tap to focus on the hero bit, then slide the exposure down a touch. Food looks richer slightly darker than your phone wants.
• Keep editing consistent. Same filter or preset every time, small adjustments only. Over-saturated food looks fake and slightly radioactive.

For menu launches, your website and anything printed, phone photos run out of road. A planned shoot with proper lighting gives you a library of hero images you’ll use for a year or more, which is why we offer food and venue photography as a separate service (we photographed the full menu for The Lennox Hotel, for example). Use the professional images for the menu, website and ads, and phone content for the day-to-day.

What a week looks like

This is a realistic plan for a pub or bistro running two or three specials and one event a week. Adjust for a cafe by swapping the evening slots for breakfast and lunch.

Three or four feed posts plus daily Stories is plenty for most venues. Stories are where your regulars actually look for “what’s on tonight”, so keep them going even when the feed is quiet.

Plan the bigger moments, like school holidays, Mother’s Day, Melbourne Cup and Christmas bookings, a couple of months out. Our content calendar built around the local year walks through how.

Captions for hungry people

Lead with the thing people want to know, and finish with what to do.

Slow-cooked lamb shoulder for two, with roast veg and gravy. Sundays from 12, $68. Book on the website or call us. It sells out.

Not:

Sunday vibes are calling ✨ Come and treat yourself to something special this weekend!

Every caption about food should answer what it is, when it’s on, how much, and how to book. Leave out anything a stranger could have written about any venue.

Things venues get wrong

Posting the menu as a photo of the menu. A shot of a printed A4 sheet is unreadable on a phone. If people need the full menu, link to a proper menu page on your website. If your printed menu is hard to read in the first place, our notes on menu design will help.

Letting Google drift out of date. Most people check your hours on Google, not Instagram. Change public holiday hours on your Business Profile at the same time you post them. Google says complete, current information helps your local ranking, and wrong hours cost you the customer who drives over and finds the doors shut.

Leaving comments and DMs unanswered. A question like “do you take bookings for 10?” is a booking. Treat it like the phone ringing.

Being careless with alcohol promotion. Liquor licensing rules in every state limit promotions that encourage rapid or excessive drinking. Bottomless anything, shot specials and “drink till you drop” style captions are the ones that get venues into trouble. If in doubt, talk to your licensee or the liquor regulator before posting.

Where to start

Pick one service, the slowest night you’d like to fill, and run the same specific special post every week for six weeks with a real photo and a clear price. Watch your bookings for that night. It’s the simplest test of whether your social is working, and it tells you more than any follower count.

For any pub with something on most nights, the real workload is keeping the feed, Stories and Google in step. If your manager is doing it at midnight after close, our hospitality social media service can take it on.