Using Hashtags To Attract Customers To Your Hospitality Venue

While social media is an integral part of marketing – particularly in the hospitality industry – a social account with no reach is like shouting into the void.

Even with high-quality images that showcase your best dishes and captions that speak to the heart of your audience, if no one’s seeing your social media posts then it’s a waste of time and money.

Using hashtags in a creative and smart way will help your beautifully composed images reach a wide range of prospective customers, and grow your engagement. Hashtags work, at their simplest, by aggregating similar content together. Tagging an image of a delicious plate of locally sourced oysters with “#seafood”, for example, will allow the image to be viewed by anyone who looks up the “seafood” hashtag.

Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, found that 90% of all Instagram accounts follow at least one business account, and 83% of users surveyed said that they found a new product or service on Instagram. This is why hashtags are such a valuable tool to make you discoverable. This is a great way to bring potential customers who are already on the lookout for the item, cuisine, or experience you’re offering, to your door. But there is an art – and strategy – to curating a highly effective hashtag grouping for your business that we’ll cover here to help you reach your target audience effectively and successfully.

Types of Hashtags

Although hashtags began their online popularity on Twitter, Instagram is where they’ve really taken off. Whatever interest, hobby, or group you’re into, there’ll be a hashtag for it – and the same goes for businesses. This is great for helping birds of a feather flock together, but it also means that you need to understand hashtags to make them work for you.

Hashtags can capture an interest (#dining), a community (#foodiesofinstagram), or a geographical area (#Australia). They can even be used to promote events (#12daysofginmas) or a branded slogan (#getsomeporkonyourfork). A combination of these types of hashtags is your best bet to grow engagement and connect with your potential customer base.

Get to know your audience

When coming up with a list of hashtags that will direct potential customers to your business, you first need to know who your customer is. Check out the accounts of customers who already follow you or have tagged you in the past – you know they love your product. What hashtags are they using? Do the venues they’re posting about use hashtags that would also attract your clientele? Scope out the profiles of your competitors, or businesses that you know are managing their social media accounts like pros and take note of the tags they’re using.

How many are too many?

Later.com, a social media scheduling website, found that the inclusion of just one hashtag on an Instagram post generated 12.6% more engagement than a post that didn’t utilise any hashtags. It may be tempting to assume that this suggests that the more hashtags, the better, but it’s not necessarily the case. There is a sweet spot to be found that will engage your target audience without coming across as spammy.

Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags on a single post and ten in an Instagram story. However, according to social media marketing website Hootsuite, the ideal number is between 5-10 for posts. The consensus on the exact number varies as social media appetites evolve and change, but the general school of thought is that you want enough hashtags to generate interest, without using so many as to come across as inauthentic.

This limited number means that you need to make your hashtags count. 

How can you widen your net, but still stand out?

When it comes to hashtags, specificity is your friend.

You know who your audience is, and you know you only have so many hashtags to reach them with, so try to find their niche.

While broad terms like “delicious” or “food” maybe some of the most popular tags on Instagram, and will push you into more search results, they’re also oversaturated and it’s easy for your post to get lost in a sea of similar posts. While the above example of “#seafood” will land you in the net of seafood lovers the world over, with hundreds of thousands of posts under the “seafood” hashtag, its popularity is a double-edged sword, and it won’t be long before your post is bumped down the feed and off your audience’s radar. Using more specific hashtags – such as “#AustralianSeafood” or “#SydneySeafoodRestaurants” – will allow your local audience to see what you have to offer without being overwhelmed by irrelevant posts.

Similarly, when thinking of the community that would be drawn to your venue, the hashtag “#melbournefoodies” will achieve significantly more engagement than the more generic “#foodie”. While the latter may land you in feeds from Lisbon to London, the real-world outcome of attracting genuine customers is lessened.

Make the first move

While hashtags will help you get in touch with a wider audience, Instagram’s engagement algorithms will still limit the reach of those posts if you’re not proactively engaging with potential customers. According to Tech Crunch, Instagram’s algorithms prioritise based on three main criteria: Interest, Recency, and Relationship.

If you’ve already got a strong social media brand created around your venue, then you’ve got interested covered. Instagram knows what you’re offering, and they know the users who would be interested. If you’re posting interesting content on a regular basis, then you’ll always have fresh, recent posts to pump into the feed. Relationship is where things get tricky. If you have a pre-existing relationship with a user, Instagram is more likely to include your posts in their discover pages and under the “Top” results for hashtag searches, even if you’re not following each other. Something as simple as hearting on a user’s relevant post, or commenting on one of their pictures, will establish a pre-existing “relationship” that will tell Instagrams algorithms that the two of you should be connected.

It’s worth taking the time to find accounts that have visited similar venues or venues local to yours or used hashtags that are relevant to your product, to find potential customers to interact with. Not only will they notice you noticing them, but your hashtags will have even more relevance to their interests, and Instagram will take note.

Crafting a well-curated and concise list of hashtags for your post will ensure that you’re engaging with a targeted and lucrative potential customer base.