Lee De Villier FBII, is a BII Licensee of the Year Award finalist and BII Ambassador, running two pubs alongside his wife Keris, The Pig and Whistle and The Beehive. Lee is particularly good at content creation, with posts promoting what’s happening at the pub, new menus, drinks and so on, but also engaging the interest of the local community with non-pub related snippets and stories. Here, we asked Lee to share his top tips for creating great social media content.
Ideas for content
Along with promoting what’s going on in the pub and shouting about our achievements, I like to try and always do something a little different. Whether that is highlighting the weird and wonderful things we do in the pub, or promoting other local businesses, it all helps to keep our customers engaged. My inspiration comes from what I would enjoying seeing myself and also thinking about what I believe our customers want. I follow pubs from all over the world to see what they are up to and I am always on the look-out to adapt any interesting content for our business.
Measuring success
I am able to measure the success of my posts by using the tools available on the specific social media platform. For instance, Facebook has interactive reports and insight tools which reveals how many people have engaged with a post, as well as showing me how long they spent on the platform and whether a link was followed. And, of course, if they liked and shared the post. Measuring how that success translates into footfall and sales can be done by a combination of things, including, monitoring whether takings have increased on a particular day and/or how many bookings we received via the platform I posted on. Every so often I do run a promotion offering a small prize to ‘the first 10 people to show this post at the bar’.
Planning for an event or launch
Normally I start promoting an event or our new menus, or whatever, about two weeks before. Timings of the post are quite important. For example, I tend to do the first post on a Sunday evening, when people are generally planning their week. Then, I will do a follow up post midweek, but I will change the layout, so that it’s repeating the content but the images and design will be different, to spark people’s interest. When I am creating a post that is hoping to attract international followers, for instance, when the Wimbledon Tennis tournament is coming up – which is a big one for us – I’ll begin posting our menus, opening times, location, etc, a month in advance, so when they’re organising their trip they can see what we have to offer. I will make sure this content is posted at the appropriate times for the USA, Australia, etc. And I also adapt the content for each country, so it’s relevant for the time of day they are viewing it in their time zone.
The sales mix
When it comes to getting the balance of content right, I work to 75% sales led and 25% stories. Stories for us can comprise of posts about events in our community, interesting facts about the pub, fun events or the opening of another local establishment, plus our sports’ teams results that week (ie, the sports teams that we sponsor).
Managing two pubs’ social media
We have two sites, the Pig & Whistle and The Beehive, and both are very different types of venues: one is foodled and the other is community-based. This makes it easier, with regards to social media, as it’s simpler to keep the content separate and promote very different offers. There are occasions when we have cross-over content, for instance, where we do similar events, like our Wine Club. But as the pubs are with different pub companies, the wines and products differ and therefore, so do the posts.
THREE TIPS FOR SUCCESS:
Hashtags are very important.
I create personal hashtags for each pub and for every post. For example #pigstheplace for The Pig and Whistle and #waggledance for The Beehive. Along with that, I believe it is important to include all hashtags relevant to the post you are writing. So, for our area, I always include #wandsworth #earlsfield #SW18. If I’m advertising a food item, like a burger, I will use #bestburger #burgersinlondon. These hashtags already exist and they are used in searches by people looking on social media for places to have a burger.
Share posts from other pubs in your area.
Yes, you will be promoting them, but they are more than likely to do the same in return. It’s a good way to reach a different audience and it’s handy to develop a good relationship with other venues on social media.
Keep it interesting, fun and interactive.
Posts that only promote the same thing every day will cause customers to lose interest and unfollow you. To keep people engaged, they must enjoy seeing your posts and look forward to what you are posting daily. Finally, it’s always a good idea to Pin your menus and opening times, which means this key information will always be on the top of your page and when customers look – it will be the first thing they see and will catch their eye and save them from having to scroll for it. Pinning a post is a great way to highlight key content.
