Tiktok tips: How to start a page for your hospitality brand

Ignore your follower count

The modern social media platform isn’t all about followers. Once upon a time, the more followers, the more eyeballs on posts, but now the algorithm means the vast majority of views on on videos will come from people who don’t follow you.

“You can go viral with 12 followers, but at the same time you can build up to having 50,000 followers and still flop,” says Francis.

Though he has consulted and worked on many different brands, on his own platform Francis only started posting regularly in September with only 300 followers. Now, at the end of November he has over 50,000. With more viral videos under your belt, the followers come naturally, though it’s not necessarily the first indicator of success. Views and engagement are the key metrics to measure success in video content.

Get people on camera

Human faces work best on social media, so it’s well worth getting your workforce on camera. It doesn’t need to be the head chef or general manager if they’re uncomfortable – any junior chef or member of the front of house team can work. The benefit to them will be that it can help their career long-term, and it can offer a human touch.

Francis recommends batch-filming content to save everyone time and to have it in the bank for when needed. If a video does go viral on social media, it’s important to follow that up quickly with more videos to keep the ball rolling.

Provide value rather than gimmicks

TikTok may be famous for silly dances and trends, which are fine to do on occasion, but what users truly want is value. A post can teach something, show something interesting or give an insight as to how a business operates.

“Be ruthless in the way you edit your videos,” says Francis. “Don’t leave any pauses, as every second has to count. It needs to be dense with information.”

Avoiding opening with fluff such as “hi guys” or “happy Monday!”. You don’t need to have a hook at the beginning of your video, and users aren’t looking for flashy content or over-used gimmicks to keep their attention. If enough value is provided throughout, that will entice an audience to stick around.

It’s not all about conversions

Unfortunately, for marketers, traditional marketing content tends to do quite poorly on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Users are savvy about avoiding content that’s trying to sell them something and it won’t work with the algorithm.

So it’s time to stop thinking about social media as a way to directly generate sales. Francis says it sits at the top of the marketing funnel – your TikTok and Instagram content will make people aware that you exist, and as they view more of your videos you’ll start to “live rent-free in people’s heads”.

“When they do come to think ‘I’m going to book my wife’s birthday dinner’, or ‘I think we should go for a little break away’, what you’ve built over time is an advantage over your competition,” says Francis.

Download the full Social Media Summit

Will Francis gave plethora of advice in the Social Media Summit and answered many questions from attendees. You can download the full video to learn more about leveraging social media including:

• How to use AI to save time
• When to deploy paid social media advertising
• Useful tools every social media marketer should know
• What content works best on each platform
• The dos and don’ts for succeeding on TikTok and Reels

Photo: sitthiphong/Shutterstock