What Your Restaurant's Social Media Metrics Are Telling You

You’re doing everything right. You’re on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You read our quick guide Social Media 101 For Restaurants. You’ve been posting and engaging regularly, or you’re in the midst of developing a plan to start up your social strategy. The next question is: is it working?
Here is step two- the key metrics to watch for to determine the success of all your social media efforts.

Facebook

A tour of your Insights
At the top of your Page, you’ll see an option called “Insights.” There you’ll find all the juicy data you’ll ever need to determine if your efforts are helping or hurting you. The most important sections to pay attention to is Likes, Reach, and Posts. The rest of the data is there for when you’re ready to be a bit more advanced.
Likes vs Followers
There’s been a bit of confusion on the difference between a Like and a Follow on a Facebook Page. To put it simply, someone can Follow your Page without actually Liking it, but if they Like it they also Follow it. In terms of advertising down the road, a Like is much more valuable, as you can target people who Like your Page. Pay attention to your Likes.

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Reach vs Impressions
Again, let’s clear things up. Reach is the number of unique users that saw your posts or your Page, and impressions is the overall number. Think of it this way, if Josie Smith saw a post 3 times, that would equal 1 reach and 3 impressions. For a restaurant, multiple touch points and repeats is key to staying top of mind. If you are tracking your metrics, pay attention to those impressions!
Posts
The Posts tab on your Insights is instrumental in helping you develop your social media strategy. There you can see when your fans are online. This will help to schedule out your posts properly. If the majority of your fans are online on Thursdays at 8pm, the optimal time to post would be Thursday between 6-7pm. That way your post will be there when they get online. If you post right at 8pm you run the risk of missing them!
The Posts tab also shows you the optimal post type. This will show you if you should be posting more photos, videos, links, or status updates.

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Instagram

The number one suggestion we have for Instagram is to switch to a Business Profile.This will give you instant access to any data for your profile. It will show you impressions, clicks, engagement, and optimal times to post. Don’t miss out on that data mine!

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Tracking your social media efforts shouldn’t be daunting. Try to look at your data at least once a month. Best practice would be to have a spreadsheet that each time you look at data you record it so you can see trends and give your data a bit more context. If you are putting all the effort into posting on social, you might as well see if it’s paying off or not!