Easily one of the most associated acts with Instagram as a service outside of the selfie, taking pictures of your food while you’re out to eat is proving successful at bringing in new business for restaurants.
And, in fact, some marketers are teaching restaurants about how they can harness the power of “user-generated content” to get their brand out there and bring in more money.
One phenomenon cited by this article from Shutterstock is just how influential user reviews and pictures on social media are in consumer decision-making processes.
A thorn in the side of many businesses, the urban tale about Yelp reviews is a real thing that many restaurants particularly worry about. The biggest reason restaurants are opposed to Yelp and systems like it is because it preferences the consumer’s feedback over the restaurant’s response. This means that the restaurant is quite powerless when it comes to addressing negative feedback and bad reviews are “forever.”
One way to counter this is through Instagram and other social media that shows off the restaurant’s food and service.
Of course, restaurants can pay people to post curated images from their restaurant’s experience, but a lot of the strategies out there involve leveraging and building a community of customers to generate content for your business.
It’s interesting to think that an oft derided trend, that of taking pictures of one’s food at a restaurant, is having a real impact on the bottom lines of some restaurants. I think we’ve all experienced the occasional sloppy hamburger or questionable salad, but a renewed focus on making everything Instagram worthy could banish those days to the past.
This news is good for photographers and videographers, especially those of us that make a living off of the craft. As more and more businesses put a premium on quality images and videos you can bet that the freelance market will benefit as a result. At least we hope.
