business basics
Social Media Marketing:
5 FREE TOOLS FOR MEXICAN RESTAURANTS | BY JOE DYSART | Facebook. Instagram.
Twitter. TikTok… The list of social media platforms the public is turning to for information about their favorite restaurants just keeps growing – and that means the challenge that restaurants face in trying to manage their social media marketing keeps growing, too. But no matter the challenge, it’s one that restaurants must meet to stay in touch with customers – current and prospective alike. Says Daniel Ku, CEO of social media marketing firm PostBeyond: “If you want to connect and engage with your future customers, you have to be where they are. And that’s largely on social media.” How can you tackle the tasks required to have a significant presence on multiple platforms? How do you organize and time posts about things like new menu items, special promotions, and seasonal celebrations to engage customers who are on social media (which is pretty much all of them)? And how do you do that without adding a significant expense to your marketing budget? One answer: Try one of the free social
media marketing tools myriad companies now offer. Of course, the companies offering these digital marketing solutions are offering free plans to entice you to switch to their paid offerings. But if your current plan is simply to engage in a moderately aggressive social media marketing campaign, or to get a feel for how best to manage your social media marketing before it becomes an expense, these tools are the perfect solution.
MARKETING TOOLS TO CONSIDER There are several benefits to trying out a free plan. One of the biggest is that they typically enable you to schedule multiple posts to various social media networks during a single log-on session. That’s an incredible time-saver when you consider the alternative: logging onto Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or another social media network every time you want to post something about your business. Free plans also can be fairly generous when it comes to scheduling posts. Agorapulse, for example, lets you schedule up to 40 posts per month, absolutely free. And Buffer, Crowdfire and Later each allow you to schedule up to 30 free
posts per month. If you decide to try out all four of those social media marketing tools at once, you’ll be able to schedule a total of 130 posts per month, or four or five marketing posts per day, absolutely free. For many Mexican restaurants, the ability to log on once a month to four free tools so they can schedule four posts per day for the next 30 days may be all the social media management they ever need. Many of these tools also offer analytics that can reveal who’s clicking on each post, which posts are driving more traffic to your website or other digital property, and which social media network is delivering the most traffic for you. Plus, some of the tools, such as Crowdfire, will help you find articles and other web-based content, which you can summarize and turn into posts to help keep your brand top-of-mind with your customers. Here’s a sampling of some of the best free social media marketing tools on the market today: Agorapulse. Agorapulse offers 40 free scheduled posts-per-month, as well as content calendar to ensure that managing your social media marketing is a snap. You can auto-post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube on Agorapulse – all from one dashboard. And you’ll be able to use Agorapulse’s onboard analytics to assess if your social media posts are driving more traffic to your restaurant’s website and assess social media sentiment about your company name and overall online reputation. Power users will also appreciate Agorapulse’s ability to create custom reports, which will track just the things you’re looking to monitor. agorapulse.com (continued on p. 32)
