A Great Recipe for New Customers: Blending Video into Your Facebook Page

Creating a buzz-worthy video showcasing your restaurant doesn’t have to be a bank-breaking experience. You can have a sophisticated and buzz-worthy video produced for well under $1000 and often for under $500. Your video, especially if you use the idea below, will pay for itself dozens of times over.

Your video can be an important addition to your website and to the pages about your restaurant that appear at Internet sites such as Google+ and TripAdvisor. In can even be shown on TV in your storefront window to grab the attention of those passing by.

Here’s another powerful use for your video: Your hard work pleasing customers has resulted dozens or even 100s of Facebook users who’ve “Liked” your restaurant’s Facebook page. Post a video on your Facebook page and turn those “Likes” into a wave of new customers in the front door:

The recipe is simple. Create a great video and then post it at your restaurant’s Facebook page along with a note asking your FB Friends to both view it and to kindly forward it to their friends if they like what they see. A few seconds later, your video and note will appear in the newsfeed of each of person who has liked you on Facebook.  They can push it on to hundreds of additional people with just a click.

Video is by far the best option for getting your FB friends to drum up new business for you. A video gives your FB friends something worth forwarding to others. A regular text post or simple images doesn’t cut the mustard.

The potentially 1000s of people who receive your video as a forward from those who “Like” you are also far more likely to view it and act on it. We’re all used to getting and watching videos this way. Today video is the way people are entertained and the way they learn. And it’s the perfect medium for you to show the recipient a great deal about your food and restaurant in a brief period of time and really motivate them to visit.

Obviously, the implicit assumption here is that the video you’ve produced isn’t a snoozer, but rather really grabs the viewer’s attention. It’s critical that your video makes your Facebook friends enthusiastic about forwarding it to others (and also makes them want to visit you again sooner than they were otherwise planning). Similarly, you need a video that truly whets the appetite of people who your Facebook friends forward the video too.

How do you make your video buzz worthy? One great method is to include time-lapse elements in it. For example, compress an evening of activity … tables filling and emptying …smiling guests enjoying a wonderful evening … into a 20 second time-lapse clip. Or show an evening of incredible action in your kitchen again collapsed from it hours in real time to a matter of seconds via time lapse. Time lapse is fascinating to watch and something easy to highlight in the note associated with your post, thereby substantially increasing the odds people will take the time to view the video.

So why not add a video to your marketing recipe? The extra profit you make by posting the video on Facebook, will pay for the video several times over, making it free for use on your website, at Google+ and TripAdvisor and even on a TV in your store front.