What to post on Instagram when you run a restaurant

Your profile is the one page everybody sees

Someone meeting your restaurant for the first time sees your profile before they see your food. Four things decide what they think: your username, your name, your profile picture and the lines underneath.

You set them once, and after that they work every day of the year, including the weeks you post nothing.

• Username: the name of your restaurant, without numbers nobody remembers.
• Profile picture: your logo. On a phone that circle is smaller than a thumbnail.
• Bio: what you sell, where you are, when you are open.
• Link: straight to your ordering page, not to a homepage where someone has to hunt.
• Business profile: address, phone number and opening hours, so the call and directions buttons appear.

If you have more than one site, keep the username generic. One account for the brand grows faster than three accounts taking reach off each other, and once your location is set you reach people nearby.

Post something every day, even when it is not perfect

Most restaurants post in bursts: four posts in a quiet week, then six weeks of silence. People do not order because they saw something beautiful once. They order because your food went past them often enough at a moment when they had not decided yet.

One photo on five or six days a week is a rhythm you can keep up with a full kitchen. You do not need a photographer, you need light, and usually that means the window.

• Put the plate by the window and let the daylight come from the side.
• Turn the flash off. It turns sauce grey and tomato orange.
• Shoot before the dish leaves the pass, while there is still steam coming off it.
• Take three photos per dish and pick one later.

One hour on a Monday morning gives you enough material for the whole week. Posting then takes two minutes a day.

The words underneath are where most places leave it

The photo stops the thumb. The caption decides whether someone stays, replies or clicks through to your ordering page. Yet most restaurants put a list of ingredients there.

Short, human and recognisable works best. Write the way you talk across the bar. If you would not say it out loud, do not put it underneath.

A handful of captions you can use today

Hashtags and your location

Use five to ten hashtags and mix three kinds: broad, such as foodie, specific, such as the name of your dish, and local, with your town or your neighbourhood. That last group brings the orders, because somebody in Groningen rarely orders in Maastricht. Always add your location too.

Send them to your own ordering page

Instagram is not yours. Your followers are borrowed and the rules change without anyone ringing you. What is yours is your own ordering site and the guests who have ordered there.

An order through Thuisbezorgd, Uber Eats or Deliveroo costs you commission on every line of the bill. The same order through your own site does not. Shortening the route from photo to order is worth money.

1. Put one link in your bio that goes straight to your ordering page.
2. Post one Story a week with a link sticker to that same page, at an hour when people are hungry.
3. Build a Highlight called Order, for the days you post nothing.

Once a month, in one sentence, say that ordering directly helps you. Guests do not mind hearing it.

Show the people, not only the plates

A plate of food looks like any other plate of food. The hands making it are yours alone, and that is what people remember.

Put your team in the frame, always with permission. Ask them what they would post, because staff who talk to guests all day know better what is funny.

Make sure your brand is somewhere in the shot: on the glass, on the bag, on the chef’s apron. Anyone who has seen three of your photos should recognise the fourth before they read the name.

A corner where people photograph themselves

A photo corner does not need a refit. One metre of wall, good light and something worth looking at: a neon letter, plants, an old map of the town. Guests photograph themselves there and put your restaurant online under their own name. Reply to it and share it again in your Stories.

This week, ask one colleague whether you can photograph them while they work.

Video takes less time than you think

Video does not need editing and does not need music. Thirty seconds in one take, straight off your phone, often does better than something that looks expensive.

• How your best known dish is made, from dough to plate.
• The kitchen at seven in the evening, with no commentary.
• A supplier arriving and the box being opened.
• A new dish your own team is tasting for the first time.
• The terrace opening on the first day the weather allows it.

Going live does not have to be frequent: once a month, ten minutes. Announce it a day ahead in your Stories, otherwise nobody watches.

Stories, Highlights and your inbox

Your feed is your window, your Stories are your voice. Two or three Stories a day is plenty: the plate going out, today’s soup, the chef tasting. They disappear after a day, so they do not have to be perfect.

Highlights are the opposite. You build them once and they stay at the top of your profile, where someone looks when they are thinking about ordering. Keep the names short, because they get cut off under the circle.

Do not forget your inbox. People ask there about allergens, about a table for eight, about whether you are open at Christmas. Check your message requests too, because anything from people you do not follow lands in there. Agree who handles the inbox, and at which two moments of the day.

Timing, local partnerships and paid reach

Post before the hunger arrives, not after it. Just before lunch and at the end of the afternoon, people can still decide where they are eating.

Then look in Meta Business Suite to see when your followers are online, because a lunch spot in the centre and a delivery pizzeria in a residential street peak at different hours. Put your weekly special up at the start of the week.

Work with accounts from your own town

You do not need an account with a hundred thousand followers. Someone with a few thousand followers in your own town often does more for you, because those followers live within cycling distance. Pick people who have already eaten with you, agree in advance what they get, and have them mark the post as advertising. In the Netherlands that is simply the rule.

When to start paying for reach

Start small. Take a post that already did well organically, aim it at a radius of a few kilometres around your restaurant and let it run for two weeks on a daily amount that will not keep you awake. One goal per campaign: clicks to your ordering page.

What to measure, and what to ignore

Followers are the number everyone watches and the number that says least. A thousand followers spread across the country are worth less than two hundred people from your own neighbourhood. Saves and shares say more than likes.

Make those three best-saved posts the blueprint for next month.

Set your profile up properly, post something real five times a week, write underneath the way you speak, and make every path end on your own ordering page. The rest is repetition, and repetition does the work here.