Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog Restaurant Online Reservation Software Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:25:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ #RestaurantIdeas installment no. 12 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/ObjsXc4088c/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-12/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:25:24 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=959 Continue reading →]]> We hope your weekend went well!

Here’s another Monday morning round of thoughts and ideas to reflect on. We hope there is something you can take with you from this post and implement in your own way for your restaurant!

One to watch:

What can you do with a massive budget, and night time access to an IKEA warehouse? How about an experiment in herding cats? Yes, IKEA got a camera crew equipped with all the high tech stuff like infrared and night vision cameras to film 100 house cats roaming free all over the show furniture.

Can we learn something from this, to be useful when a marketing budget is a fraction of IKEA’s? I think so. The lesson is that  businesses need to be remarkable to stand out in the noise. Be different, have fun, make sure people can share that fun.

And the making of, worth watching as well:

One thing to make you think:

Most industries don’t last forever. They are born, evolve, commoditize, decline, die. Five years ago most people hadn’t heard of social media. Five years ago the iPhone revolutionized and changed the entire mobile industry. 25 years ago newspapers were still doing fine…

According to a recent Wired article, there are now computer algorithms able to sift through online data and write coherent and useful news reports.

In other words, the robots are not satisfied taking over our physical production processes, they are now getting artistic licenses as well! :)

For good or for bad, the restaurant trade is inherently local, social, and (in most cases!) a labour of love. Hopefully we won’t see that change for some time yet. Although SciFi movies with ATM style food manufacturing machines on every street corner springs to mind…

Read the full story: Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?

More #RestaurantIdeas for your perusing pleasure

As originally posted on Twitter. Would love for you to join the conversation!

Those are a few of the ideas from last week. Now it’s your turn! Start posting! :)

]]> http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-12/feed/ 0 http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-12/ #RestaurantIdeas installment no. 11 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/vEThCVzxCh8/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-11/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:32:52 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=950 Continue reading →]]> Spring is here, the air feels fresh and the world is renewed. Here are a few fresh ideas to fuel your week.

We hope there is something you can take with you from this post and implement in your own way for your restaurant!

One to watch:

In any walk of life, I admire skill. Skill beyond average, skill to the level of looking like magic.

Here’s a guy who has practiced his chosen art to the point where the laws of physics no longer seem to apply. He is a master of his tool, and when he wields it the world must stop in awe.

Watching him I get the feeling he would be great at anything he set his mind to. His passion just happens to be street trial bike riding…

What really gives me the goose bumps is the realization of how long he must have been practicing. And fallen from high places, only to get up again. And again.

One thing to make you go “damn!”

Facebook now boasts 901 million users. Yes, nine hundred and one MILLION users. They are edging up to the 1 billion mark and they expect to be there before the end of the year.

As social networks go, Facebook is the silverback gorilla. Check out this post on Mashable with some amazing numbers on how active those users are.

Are you using Facebook? Are you getting back your time investment’s worth? Let us know in the comments.

More #RestaurantIdeas for your perusing pleasure

As originally posted on Twitter. Would love for you to join the conversation!

Those are a few of the ideas from last week. Now it’s your turn! Start posting! :)

]]> http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-11/feed/ 0 http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-11/ Tracking your website performance http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/8Z2i2qJfLLc/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/progress/tracking-your-website-performance/#comments Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:56:16 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=937 Continue reading →]]> As web developers we love numbers. Google Analytics is one of our important tools to try to understand where our web visitors come from, are they on desktop or mobile, which blog posts are most read, and which of our social media pages bring us the most new sign ups to Freebookings!

Google Analytics can become a bit overwhelming though, and it’s easy to forget to go back regularly and sift through the data to find the nuggets of insight.

That’s why we in the latest release of Freebookings added in a few nifty graphs and numbers to reveal right in your reservation system how many reservations you get, and if your customers are browsing your website using computers or mobile devices.

Here’s an example:

Reservation Tool Statistics Example for Freebookings

On your dashboard page you get to see these numbers for the past seven days:

  • Total visitors to your reservations widget
  • Split visitor numbers between computer users and mobile users
  • Reservations and covers by day

As you can see in the example screenshot above, the restaurant in question has a clear peak for Fridays and Saturdays. Perhaps run an email blast with a campaign for Tuesdays and Wednesdays to try and bring some more traffic in earlier in the week?

You can also see that there’s about 14% mobile visitors to the reservations page on the website. Is this good? Bad? Something wrong? Impossible to say without knowing more about the website itself (and perhaps comparing it to your Google Analytics statistics for your website as a whole), but if that number one week were suddenly to drop or increase dramatically it is an indicator that you should take some time to try and figure out why.

Like it? Provide us with feedback on Twitter, or in the comments below!

And before we end this post, a teaser hint of one of the things we are working on right now. Yes, we are working on a report function that lets you see statistics for a longer time frame:

Reporting Function in upgraded Freebookings

This and more is part of our upcoming upgrade version! Keep your eyes peeled for more details to be released!

]]> http://www.freebookings.com/blog/progress/tracking-your-website-performance/feed/ 0 http://www.freebookings.com/blog/progress/tracking-your-website-performance/ #RestaurantIdeas installment no. 10 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/p3PsIVIvqyk/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-10/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:37:04 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=930 Continue reading →]]> Another Monday, another round of restaurant marketing ideas and inspirational thoughts from around the interwebs.

We hope there is something you can take with you from this post and implement in your own way for your restaurant!

One to watch:

Watching the news it is far too easy to think our world is becoming a more horrible place to live in by the minute. Statisticians like to point out to us that it isn’t so. Average life expectancy is higher than ever, there are fewer conflicts going on, there is more exchange of thoughts and ideas across borders than ever in the history of mankind.

Looking at averages is deceiving though. Despite the world being a better place, a lot of people get squeezed every day. Just like if you put one hand in boiling water and the other in a bucket with ice cubes, on average your hands are in a hot but acceptable 122 degrees. That doesn’t change the fact that one of your hands will get serious burns…

So is the world a better place today than yesterday? Is your business doing better today than it did last year? Quite often it’s a matter of perspective. The average, or the individual. The short term, or the long. The financial, or the operational.

Here’s a video clip to help bring some perspective, a trip around the world shown using over 6,000 photos in a time lapse fashion.

I find this video really relaxing. After all, in a world as wonderful as this, there has to be something for everyone. An opportunity around every corner. A dream coming true every minute.

And after that slightly hippie flavored note, on to some hardcore marketing related thoughts!

One thing to make you think:

What is “marketing” to you? Is it an activity you do separately from the restaurant, spending time with email tools, advertising agencies, and printing flyers?

How does marketing relate to your product? If your product is “making people feel welcome and have a great time while sharing tasty food”, isn’t a lot of your marketing embedded in how you deliver that product? After all, if your product is as great as you like to think, your customers will let their friends know all about it.

Seth Godin wants us to think of marketing first. Marketing is product. From the very first minute you start thinking about a new concept, start thinking about how you make people aware of it, and make them want it!

Read his as always short but powerful thoughts here: When should we add marketing?

More #RestaurantIdeas for your perusing pleasure

As originally posted on Twitter. Would love for you to join the conversation!

Those are a few of the ideas from last week. Now it’s your turn! Start posting! :)

]]> http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-10/feed/ 0 http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-10/ #RestaurantIdeas installment no. 9 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/7-u9an73JwA/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-9/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:52:28 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=916 Continue reading →]]> Here’s this week’s installment of #RestaurantIdeas, highlighting a few thoughts in the space of restaurant business and online marketing.

Is there anything here you can use to increase the number of reservations from your website?

One thing to watch:

When we are really busy, thinking about the distant future is difficult. It isn’t made easier by the fact that the world around us, especially online, seems to change faster and faster.

That said, I would argue that having a vision for the future, a guiding light to work towards, is more important than ever. What will your restaurant be like a year from now? Three years? Five?

This video looks 50 years into the future, which may be a bit excessive, but it sure is entertaining…

One thing to take you to a different place:

Flea markets, car boot sales and antique shops are all full of items that somebody once coveted. I definitely find them places of inspiration. Here are some of the most exciting markets in Paris.

Les Puces de Vanves, a charming flea market in Paris

Read on: Paris’s best antiques and street markets

(Photo from Flickr, courtesy of genibee and licensed under Creative Commons.)

And with that, on to last week’s #RestaurantIdeas! Feel free to contribute your own inspired thoughts in the comment section at the end of the post.

More #RestaurantIdeas for your perusing pleasure

As originally posted on Twitter. Would love for you to join the conversation!

Those are a few of the ideas from last week. Now it’s your turn! Start posting! :)

]]> http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-9/feed/ 0 http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/restaurantideas-installment-no-9/ Control how links to your website are presented in a Facebook status update http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/jvdv8l38f-I/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/control-the-image-and-text-shown-in-a-facebook-status-update/#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:11:08 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=127 Continue reading →]]> Have you ever wondered how Facebook knows which image and text to show next to a link you post in a status update?

Or, perhaps closer to the truth, why it didn’t get a nice looking title or image when you could clearly see them on the page?

Wonder no more, here is an explanation of how it works, and how you can use it to your advantage in your restaurant marketing efforts.

To visualize what I am talking about, in the below example you can see that a suitable image and exciting text snippet is shown just below the status update for the link about to be posted:

Facebook status update with a link attached

To post a link with a status update, you simply paste it into the status update field, at which point Facebook shows the extra information for the link automatically. You can then remove your link from the actual status update just keeping your additional text.

Why is this important? First of all, it is hopefully not just you sharing links to your site. Whenever someone else shares a link on Facebook you want to make sure you control which image and what text snippet is shown. If you haven’t explicitly defined this in your page, Facebook will make a “best effort” to grab what information there is, which means the image could be something completely non food related, and the text snippet could be the not very exciting address to your restaurant…

With an appealing image and a mouth watering text snippet, you increase the chance of people noticing the link and clicking through to visit your website and place an order or make a reservation!

In other words, in geek speak, this is all about optimising the chance of conversion and make links to your website shared on Facebook bring in visitors who would otherwise not think about you. Incidentally, this tip also enhances your search engine optimisation, adding value to how you are presented in the Google search result.

So, on to the gory details of how this works.

Anatomy of a shared link on Facebook

Anatomy of a Facebook status update with shared link

To be clear, when I use the words “title”, “image”, and “text snippet”, these are the parts of the shared link I am referring to.

Again, to make these items show up in your status update, all you need to do is paste a link to the page you want to share into the status update text field. Once Facebook has fetched the title, image and text snippet you can remove the link from your update to keep the text clean and readable. The link below your update will be clickable for all your fans.

If you have updated your page following the advice herein, but don’t see any changes when sharing the link on Facebook, scroll down to the bottom of this post to learn how to force Facebook to update data they may have saved about the page at an earlier time.

Controlling the title of the shared link

The title, shown in bold below your added status update text, comes from the page you are linking to. This title is not shown on the actual web page though, it is the text in the title tag located in the page HTML code in what is called “the HEAD element”, between the tags <head> and </head>.

Search engines place a lot of value on this piece of text, so for your search engine rankings you should make sure you have a unique and descriptive title tag, with relevant keywords, on every page of your site.

As you now know, the title tag is also used in many other circumstances, such as the Facebook status update! Therefor, make sure the title text is readable, eye catching, relevant and selling. Or in geek speak: make the Call To Action strong!

Keep it short and snappy. Typical search engine guidelines says to keep it below 70 characters, and in the case of the Facebook shared link you want people to be able to take it in at a glance.

Controlling the shared link text snippet

The text snippet below the bold title is your chance to provide some more information about what the person seeing the link might expect if they click it.

This information is again taken from the <head> … </head> part of the web page, using what is called “the meta description” tag. Similarly to the title tag mentioned above search engines make heavy use of this to display under links in a search result page.

Example from the Freebookings start page:

<meta name=”description” content=”Free online reservations software for your restaurant website and Facebook page. Online booking tool, restaurant reservation book, and customer database.” />

Here is your chance to really convince a person who noticed your link that they should visit the page. Describe in selling words why this page is worth a visit, and phrase it in terms of the value it brings to the visitor!

Keep it below 150 characters, as more won’t be shown anyway, and do take the time to write a unique description for each page in your website.

NOTE! If you don’t use the specific meta description tag to supply the text snippet, Facebook (and search engines) will grab any piece of text on your page that they think makes sense. Leaving the selection of this text snippet up to them comes with a big risk of showing just gibberish under your link title. Missed opportunity!

Controlling the image next to the link

The image (“thumbnail”), or more correctly images as you can use the small arrows in the Facebook update tool to step through available images if there are more than one to choose from on the page, will simply be taken from whatever images are found on your page unless you tell Facebook specifically which ones you want to be used.

To specify which images to make available to the person sharing the link, you again place a specific tag in the <head> … </head> section of the page HTML code:

<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://www.freebookings.com/cdn/images/logo.png” />

Where you see “href=” you add the address to the image you want to make available for the status update tool on Facebook. Yes, you can add more than one. Just add separate tags like the one above for each image.

Make sure the images are beautiful, relevant, mouth watering and also, yours! Don’t supply links to images you don’t own the right to use online.

Pro tip: update the cache of your shared link in Facebook

Links that have already been shared on Facebook will be “cached”, which means that Facebook re-uses the same title, text snippet and image over and over again when it is posted in the future by other people (they do this to minimise load on their already busy servers).

To tell Facebook to go and update their cached information for a specific link, you can use a developer tool that is available to everyone (even if you aren’t a registered developer).

Go to the page here (the “Object Debugger”) and paste the link to your page in what lools like a search field, then click the “Debug” button.

You will see a page like the image below, listing what information Facebook has now collected from your page, in order to produce pretty looking status updates when the link is shared. Ignore the part about “Open Graph Warnings”, that’s a topic for a separate blog post, but for the purposes of today you can safely leave them hanging…

Facebook's Object Debugger, great tool to refresh saved information about links to your website

Conclusion

The little details make all the difference, we know this. Same goes for online marketing and social media. This is a one time effort that you can choose to do for your site as a whole, or with individual images and text snippets for your individual pages, but do take the time to get this right to make sure your restaurant brand gets the the right attention.

We hope you found this little tutorial helpful! Let us know any questions, or share your favorite Facebook tips in the comment section below. :)

]]> http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/control-the-image-and-text-shown-in-a-facebook-status-update/feed/ 2 http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/control-the-image-and-text-shown-in-a-facebook-status-update/ Spring is here, welcome to our new customers! http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/K6hVx_Qx5D0/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/website-design/spring-is-here-welcome-to-our-new-customers/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:49:49 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=815 Continue reading →]]> Spring is rolling in, are you planning a spring clean for your online presence yet?

A warm welcome to all the restaurants that have signed up to Freebookings lately. Take the opportunity when you add our reservations widget to your website to review the rest of your content, your navigation, and your site’s usability in general.

Here is a short checklist of the most important things to get right in order for your website to have a chance to contribute to your business:

  • Can you easily find everything you think diners would want to know, before and after a visit?
  • Do you mention the name and location of your restaurant on most pages, in the page footer, in the page titles? This is important for your search engine rankings.
  • Does the style of your website reflect the style of your restaurant?
  • Does your website load properly on different browsers and computers? If your website fails on browsers like Chrome or Safari, you are effectively turning a big percentage of visitors away.
  • What happens if you try to access your website with an iPhone? With as much as 20% of site traffic now coming from smartphones, you need to sort this out.
  • Is it really easy to find your reservations page, and is the process of making a reservation as simple as possible? If you signed up for Freebookings, the latter half of this bullet point is already solved. ;)

Here is a page dedicated to tips & tricks on how to get the most value out of your restaurant website, if you want some more ideas.

Also visit this small selection of the latest restaurants who have signed up to Freebookings to start taking reservations through their own website or Facebook Page, see if you can take some inspiration from them:

  • Hale Springs Inn, 110 West Main St, Rogersville, TN
    Combining a hotel with a successful restaurant and presenting them both in the same website always creates interesting problems. What to focus on? Are we mainly a hotel, or a restaurant? How do we deal with reservations, and how do we offer that functionality in the website in a not confusing way? I think Hale Springs Inn have done a good job facing these complex decisions, and the photos of food sprinkled around the website certainly make me curious to come visit!
  • Viceroy of India, 233 E. Roosevelt Rd, Lombard, IL
    When you have mainly 4 and 5 star reviews all over your Yelp page, leading with that social proof on your website makes perfect sense. With a nice and simple design, and all the information and functions a customer would expect (I love the fact the menus aren’t PDF, making them much quicker and easier to read) I’d say this website is a winner.
  • Flying Rhino Cafe, 278 Shrewsbury St, Worcester, MA
    Flying Rhino (now there’s a name that puts a picture in your head!) have gone for the kind of implementation we love: right up front on the start page of the website where it can’t be miss. To over for visitors arriving from a search engine directly at a sub page they have also added the reservations widget to other key pages in the website. We love it!

For more information on best practice with regards to implementation of Freebookings, and how to guides, see the help pages in our support portal: help.freebookings.com. Feel free to ask us any questions, or leave your comments below.

Thank you all who have joined us for signing up!

]]> http://www.freebookings.com/blog/website-design/spring-is-here-welcome-to-our-new-customers/feed/ 0 http://www.freebookings.com/blog/website-design/spring-is-here-welcome-to-our-new-customers/ Start your week with a few #RestaurantIdeas http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/yMqq5kR-pLk/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/start-your-week-with-a-few-restaurantideas/#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:26:56 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=867 Continue reading →]]> We’re back with a number of ideas and thoughts to bring you some inspiration, setting your week off in a creative mood.

One thing to watch:

Throwing a few cockroaches into the restaurant marketing mix may not be a great idea, but unless you are of the squeamish disposition (yes, there will be cockroach dismemberment, but I have been assured they have the amazing ability to regenerate limbs!) this is a great video to spend a few minutes with.

What I like about this TED talk isn’t just the really fascinating presentation, but how it made me think about the importance of having great teachers in school, teachers that tickle your imagination and grab your attention, not letting go until you have learned something.

Translated to the world of marketing, consider for a minute the importance of tuning your marketing message to your audience for maximum impact. How many kids left that auditorium thinking neuroscience is cool? Is your marketing making a difference?

One thing to make you think:

Books are such a dry and boring topic, right? Wrong. Check out these amazing book stores, and how they have created an absolutely mind blowingly beautiful and creative environment around their products.

What can you add to your restaurant to make the experience more unique?

Gallery: The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World

Check out the ceiling in this beautiful bookstore

I love the ceiling of this store, books all around you!

And with that, on to last week’s #RestaurantIdeas! Feel free to contribute your own inspired thoughts in the comment section at the end of the post.

More #RestaurantIdeas for your perusing pleasure

As originally posted on Twitter. Would love for you to join the conversation!

Those are a few of the ideas from last week. Now it’s your turn! Start posting! :)

]]> http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/start-your-week-with-a-few-restaurantideas/feed/ 0 http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/start-your-week-with-a-few-restaurantideas/ Content curation – how showing off your expertise and great taste can generate business in your restaurant http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/ckmq7qXX3-c/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/content-curation-how-showing-off-your-expertise-and-great-taste-can-generate-business-in-your-restaurant/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:05:25 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=100 Continue reading →]]> Lately there has been a lot of talk about “content curation” in online marketing circles. In this post I’ll explain what it is, why it is useful, and introduce a great tool for curating content either for your own amusement or to try and drive more traffic to your restaurant.

Personally I have been a fan of curation for a long time, as it is perhaps the best way to find great information on hot as well as niche topics: find a person (or a group of people) with true passion and knowledge on something, follow them on their blog / Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook / Pinterest / LinkedIn and read the links they share as they curate information on their favorite topic… Beats any search engine.

“Curation” in this context is not about making ham, it is simply a fancy way of saying “collection of great stuff”. It then follows that a “content curator” is a person who (for our purposes today typically browsing the web) discerningly collects great stuff on a given topic. This may or may not be seen as “great stuff” to you, but rest assured it will to someone.

What has this to do with online marketing though, I hear you ask. Well, it’s quite simple.

Say you are in the business of selling widgets. The world is full of people looking for widgets, but with the current state of search engines (not working that well to find the latest / coolest / most popular widgets) a person who takes the time to build an online collection of great widgets from the best and most exciting widget makers can attract a lot of visitors as the word spreads.

Leverage the power of social media to spread links and build a community around your widget collection, and you have a valuable marketing asset.

Summing it up: By collecting and talking about widgets you attract people interested in widgets, which creates a great opportunity to sell widgets off the back of your widget collection.

There are several tools out there to help people curate content. Names that spring to mind are:

  • Paper.li, News.me and Flipboard – these services automatically curate a “magazine” of news articles, photos and videos shared by people you follow on for example Twitter and Facebook. The most shared links are assigned the highest score, and the most popular ones make it into your personal magazine. By carefully choosing who you follow, this magazine will become highly tailored to the topics people talk about. Unique to Paper.li is that you can have your magazine published daily on their website.
  • Tumblr – personal blogging platform, optimized for the users to share snippets of content, photos and video. You can create a Tumblog for any topic, and start manually curating content on the cutest Wall Street occupiers, pop culture nostalgia, useful charts and diagrams, anything. No, seriously: anything.
  • Pinterest – the hottest curation website right now. While only on the radar of most for the past six months, this website already drives more traffic to other sites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. No wonder it has caught the attention of online marketers everywhere. Rather than summing it up, I’ll elaborate on Pinterest in the rest of this post as I find it so well suited for the highly visual restaurant trade. Yeah, I know that last sentence sounds like gibberish. Read on.

Most people have a topic they care deeply about. Looking at the restaurant world, I know a lot of restaurant owners and chefs who are deeply fascinated by food and unique ingredients (obviously); fancy wines or wines with interesting bottles and labels; interior design and pieces of furniture; fashion and style…

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a place to save links to all the things you find and read about though? A place that highlighted the photos and videos, making it so much easier to go back and find various things again, rather than just little snippets of text?

This is exactly what Pinterest does. In short: Pinterest gives people a creative and beautiful looking outlet to save their finds, and in the process also publish them online making it easier for others of a similar persuasion to find the great stuff (this is where the marketing part comes in).

How does Pinterest work?

Pinterest is a website where registered users can save links to things they like. They do this by first creating a “board” for the topic, like a notice board or mood board, and then “pinning” photos or videos from the web pages they want to save to these boards. Or “re-pinning” stuff other people have saved to Pinterest (yes, it can get a bit circular…).

A board can for example be “Restaurants in New York I recommend” or “Amazing tattoo designs“. It could of course also be “Dishes we’d like to cook” or “Great kitchen tools”, “Italian wines with quirky labels”, “Our staff picks favourite restaurants”, “Spring ingredients”…

Example of boards on Pinterest

Above you see my profile on Pinterest, and each “square” is a link to a board which when clicked reveals a number of photos or videos that I have collected under headings that interest me.

You can also follow other people on Pinterest, and if you do your start page will show you what those people are pinning and re-pinning, providing you with a veritable stream of exciting imagery feeding your imagination and creativity.

This ability to follow others, and comment on, “like”, and re-pin what people are pinning makes Pinterest a very social tool. Beautiful images or brilliant videos can spread incredibly quickly and put the links to the pages holding those images in front of a lot of people.

Note: Since a link can only be saved to Pinterest if it has a photo or video on the page, it’s all about the visuals! In other words, Pinterest is not a place for crappy out of focus photos or stock photography. As the makers of the site put it: “Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.”

Which food and restaurant brands are already using Pinterest?

Already brands are exploring Pinterest to try and add value to their operations. A few noteworthy examples to study are:

Looking at these you will find that one thing they all have in common is that they are trying to tell a story. That story is not just about what they sell, it’s a story about them as a company, about their customers, about their employees. Things they care about and find interesting.

How to use Pinterest for your restaurant

There are two main aspects to Pinterest for brands:

  1. Make sure what you do and publish on your website is “pinnable”, so people already on Pinterest can share great stuff about your brand:
    • Use amazing photos (or videos) and make sure they can easily be pinned. Create an account on Pinterest to learn how to do pin things, and try it on your own website photos to see if your website is “Pinterest ready”…
    • Add the “Pin this” button to pages you specifically want to encourage people to pin photos from.
    • Make sure photos that are pinned always lead to a great looking web page on your site, and make sure that page in turn tries to lead people on to explore more about your place – show links to your menu, or to make a reservation. Once you have the visitor’s attention, try to make something of it!
  2. If you decide to have an active Pinterest profile, make sure you use it in a way that is likely to resonate with the people you want to attract:
    • I’ll say it again: use amazing visual content!
    • Link to your Pinterest page from your website, share links to boards and pins on Facebook and Twitter to show the world what you are collecting. Pro tip: you can add Pinterest to your Facebook Timeline by connecting your accounts, making your pins really visible to your Facebook fans.
    • Tell a story, don’t just drone on about your products.
    • Even of you do tell a story, don’t just post photos of your food. Go beyond food, to other areas of interest that you feel shows what your restaurant is about.
    • Be active, like the photos of others, re-pin other stuff you like and appreciate. Show there are real people behind your restaurant name, and show what you care about.

Pinterest, through being so visual, creates a very emotive atmosphere. People go on Pinterest to be wowed, to learn new things and explore concepts that fascinate them.

Take this opportunity to blow life in your brand, connect with your customers in a completely different way than what Twitter or Facebook can offer.

Don’t be afraid to pin photos and videos about brands you may see as competitors. Re-pin photos of dishes and interiors from other restaurants, be that resource for photos of a certain type that attracts the right people. So what if you occasionally lead a fellow Pinterest member off to a different website than your own, at the end of the day they will remember you as the source where they find that particular photo or link that wows them.

Show confidence in your restaurant, share the things that truly wow you, and provide the entertainment people are looking for. After all, shared joy is double the joy, right?

Keep in mind that Pinterest also provides yet another way to see what your customers like. Did that photo of your rib-eye steak get liked and re-pinned way beyond your other photos? There might be an interesting insight there…

Aside from your own pin boards, what else are people pinning? Are their obvious areas of interest among your customers and online fans? Perhaps you’ll learn things about your fans that you never knew, that will help you talk to them in a more interesting way or improve your marketing reach.

For some further reading on how Pinterest works and how other brands are using it to drive business, check out these great articles:

If you do start using Pinterest, let us know the link to your boards in the comments (or tweet us on Twitter @Freebookings), we’d love to learn more about what gets your creative juices flowing…!

]]> http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/content-curation-how-showing-off-your-expertise-and-great-taste-can-generate-business-in-your-restaurant/feed/ 0 http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/content-curation-how-showing-off-your-expertise-and-great-taste-can-generate-business-in-your-restaurant/ Get inspired by these great #RestaurantIdeas http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FreebookingsRestaurantReservations/~3/mqDfNW9xFMM/ http://www.freebookings.com/blog/social-media/get-inspired-by-these-great-restaurantideas/#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:12:54 +0000 Freebookings http://www.freebookings.com/blog/?p=826 Continue reading →]]> We’re back with a number of ideas and thoughts to bring you some inspiration, setting your week off in a creative mood.

One thing to watch:

Hammering home the idea that looking at things in a different light sometimes may help overcome the toughest mental blocks, in this short stop motion movie every day objects are turned into differently delicious looking guacamole…

One thing to make you think:

This short but very interesting post talks about whales, and how they can swallow your business. No, not the cute Twitter fail whale. While causing a lot of users frustration, it probably doesn’t impact your restaurant much.

Whale, in this article’s context, is the area where a company makes the most money. In today’s online environment, where so many services are competing for the attention of your restaurant with claims of rocket powering your marketing, you need to think about what their real agenda is. Are their business interests aligned with yours, or are they building value in a way that actually long term can hurt your trade? In short: follow the money…

Think Groupon building a business around bargain hunters; OpenTable building a brand around consumers searching for restaurants, sometimes promoting your competitors over you.

Read: Groupon’s whale problem

And with that, on to last week’s #RestaurantIdeas! Feel free to contribute your own inspired thoughts in the comment section at the end of the post.

More #RestaurantIdeas for your perusing pleasure

As originally posted on Twitter. Would love for you to join the conversation!

Those are a few of the ideas from last week. Now it’s your turn! Start posting! :)

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