Hey Food Truckers! Welcome to part II of V in our "Social Media for Food Trucks" series. This week we're focusing on tips and tricks to keep in mind when posting on social media.
Post your schedule, locations and any specials daily. Be consistent with your content – decide on a "voice" to use on social, and your gallery of photos should all look like snapshots of the same ongoing story. This helps your followers get a feel for your brand.
When you post a menu, we encourage you to post descriptions but not prices. Especially early in the process of getting your truck set up, if you haven't yet figured out what the pricing really needs to be. We suggest this since you may post a menu with your pricing in a daily post now, and in 6 months a user who dug through your timeline can comment on it and it will begin to repopulate in your followers news feeds due to "new" activity on this post, even though in reality it is 6 months old. This makes the post look like new, relevant information when in fact it is old and outdated.
Link your Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, FourSquare, etc. accounts. By linking your accounts, any schedule posts you publish to Facebook will automatically post to your Twitter account, which saves you time. This is also a great way to publish posts longer than 140 characters to Twitter – your fans can begin to read your content and will be redirected to your Facebook page if they would like to see the full post.
Social media engagement is markedly higher on posts that contain images as opposed to just text. Post on Instagram and link your account to Facebook and Twitter so you can share your photos to all 3 platforms with one click. Foodies and food truck fans LOVE food pics, so share those amazing photos and include a little information on what it is, ingredients, flavor, etc.
Find ways to engage your customers in a way that makes sense for your brand! Use questions, polls, contests, photos, hashtags etc. Let people know how they can tag you by selecting a hashtag specific to your truck. For example "We'd love to see your favorite food truck meal this week! Share your photos and tag us at #tbftr."
Use social media as a two-way street for customer service. Most customers expect a response when they reach out to companies using social channels. Respond to both positive and negative feedback in a timely and professional manner. In public messages, don't forget to tag the person/page you are responding to so they receive a notification that you have answered! (We will go over tagging users more in series III and IV.) You do not need to "tag" users in private messages, as they will receive a notification automatically.
Please let us know if you have any questions, and check back with us next week for part III: tagging and adding events on Facebook.