How to Use Twitter for Marketing a Takeaway

Marketing your takeaway comes in all forms, shapes and sizes, from the menus you post through the doors of your local neighbourhood to the way you interact with potential customers online. In addition to the growing number of takeaways that are now investing in a website to making online ordering a possibility, an increasing number are also turning to social media to promote all that they do and speak to the widest possible audience.

One of the most popular social media platforms, Twitter, can be a great tool for interacting and engaging with your customers, so long as you put the time and effort into producing great content that people are actually going to be interested in!

Here’s a few ways in which you can use Twitter as part of the marketing strategy you develop for your takeaway business:

A sales tool, but don’t be too salesy

With a limited number of characters to play with, it can be tempting to go all out with the sales pitch, promoting all the great things that your takeaway can offer to customers tweet after tweet.

However, and whilst the occasional promotional tweet isn’t going to do any harm, your followers will quickly get fed up of their feed being filled with you selling yourself all the time.

Mix things up a little by posting things they might not know about your takeaway, where your food is sourced from and the backgrounds of the staff who work there. Promoting the human element and allowing your customers to see that you are passionate about your business will only serve you well!

Run Twitter only offers

Twitter users are more inclined to follow a brand if they are rewarded with discounts and promotions.

Incentives can make a huge difference when it comes to building and maintaining your follower count, so consider the following:

• Daily specials
• Award users with a special discount code for mentioning your takeaway on Twitter
• Encourage followers to post pictures of themselves in your takeaway, with a winner of a free meal announced every month
• Get users to tweet what they love most about your food to be in with the chance of winning a prize

Take the time to engage with customers

The one thing that is likely to put your followers off the most is if people are attempting to engage with you over Twitter and you are failing to respond.

If you are short on time to do this, why not delegate to other members of staff as they’ll probably appreciate the fact that you are including them in your business marketing strategy?

When it comes to engaging with those on Twitter:

• Always answer any questions users post to your over Twitter
• Make sure you reply to anyone that mentions your takeaway or their experience with you
• Always like and retweet tweets from customers leaving you positive reviews
• Never ignore the bad comments that come in too. Apologise if they express that they aren’t happy and encourage them to carry on the conversation over a private message. You could even offer them a little freebie for the next time they come in to help defuse the situation.

Invite comment from users

Following on from the above point, Twitter enables you instant access to a large audience, so if you want their opinion on something, you generally only have to ask to start getting the feedback coming in.

Whether you’re looking for feedback on a new item you’ve added to the menu, the amount of meals that you currently offer, whether they feel your food is too expensive or even if they think improvements could be made to your takeaway, for instance adding some tables and chairs; all of these are things that you can ask your audience.

One thing you can guarantee is that you’ll get honest feedback so be prepared to see some comments that you might not necessarily like or agree with, however you’ve opened yourself up for it, so take it on-board and pull out the comments that you can move forward with.

You can then make the necessary changes based on this feedback there and then; any problems won’t linger or snowball further. You can make immediate changes, put a plan in place to improve and even arrange additional training for team members to right any wrongs that have been highlighted by your Twitter followers.

Let people know you’re on Twitter

It’s not easy or a particularly quick process when it comes to building up your Twitter following, so any opportunity you get to promote the fact that you are on Twitter should be taken.

If you have a website currently, add a widget on there that links through to your Twitter profile, enabling visitors to easily start following your account. Additionally, any other marketing materials that you offer, whether it be menus, pens or pizza boxes, should make it clear that you are on Twitter as well as any of the other social media platforms too.

Don’t forget the hashtags

Remember that Twitter was the original home of the hashtag, so make sure you use them in your tweets. Using one or two in every tweet can help boost engagement and assist in your tweets reaching a wider audience.

You can make up your own tweets based around any specials you have, specific promotions and your takeaway as a whole, whilst also looking to see what is trending on Twitter to jump on the existing hype surrounding that particular hashtag.

Get followers to do something for you

Don’t forget that you can also get your followers to do something for you too; it doesn’t have to be all one way.

If you want your followers to retweet something to help spread the word about your business or a great offer you have running for one night only, don’t be afraid to ask them.

You’ll be surprised at the outcome as your retweet count will be much higher on the tweets where you ask them to retweet compared to the tweets where you don’t.

If your takeaway business hasn’t signed up for Twitter yet, give it a go and start experimenting with your content and trying different things to boost and engage with your followers.