Step 1. Decide what the account is for
Write down one number you want it to move: covers on weekdays, bookings for events, delivery orders, or average spend. Everything below changes depending on the answer. An account built for weekday covers looks nothing like an account built for private-event bookings.
For the city bar we worked with, the goal was explicit: be the venue people name first, and fill tables midweek — not only on Friday.
Step 2. Stop posting the product, start posting the people
Food photos are table stakes; they don’t travel. What travels is character. In practice, that means five recurring formats:
- Staff as characters. A bartender with a name and a running joke outperforms any cocktail close-up. People follow people.
- Guest moments. Real tables, real reactions, filmed with permission. This is your social proof and your content budget at the same time.
- Behind the pass. Prep, plating, the 2 a.m. clean-up. Process content is the cheapest reliable reach you have.
- Menu drops as events. A new dish is not an announcement, it’s a reason to come this week.
- The room itself. Light, music, how full it feels. People book an evening, not a dish.
Step 3. Give a reason to come this week
The single biggest change we make to restaurant accounts: every week there is one post whose job is to produce a booking in the next seven days. A limited cocktail, a guest chef, a live set, a Tuesday-only portion. Without a deadline, a viewer who likes your page will come “sometime” — which, measured honestly, often means never.
Step 4. Make booking one tap
Count the taps between a Reel and a confirmed table. If it is more than two, you are losing bookings to friction. Minimum setup: a booking link in bio that opens directly on a reservation form or WhatsApp, a pinned post with hours and address, and a highlight called “Book a table” — not “Info”.
This is where most venues leak. The content works, the profile doesn’t convert, and the agency reports views.
Step 5. Use ads to amplify what already worked
Do not write ads from scratch. Take the Reels that already performed organically and put budget behind those, targeted to people in your city who engage with restaurant and nightlife content. For events, start the campaign three to four days out — earlier is wasted, later is too late to plan an evening.
That combination — entertainment-first Reels plus precisely targeted Meta ads — is what produced the 508% jump in accounts reached in our bar case. Neither half did it alone.
Step 6. Shoot once a month, publish all month
The reason restaurant accounts die is that nobody has time to film daily. Fix it structurally: one or two filming sessions a month on site, with a shot list, producing 12–20 Reels plus stories. Editing, captions, publishing and replies happen off-site afterwards. The kitchen gives up two hours a month, not two hours a day.
Step 7. Report bookings, not reach
Agree the metric before launch and look at it weekly. For restaurants we report table bookings and enquiries; views are context, not the result. In a comparable project for a cocktail brand, one campaign produced 69 direct orders — that is the kind of line a report should contain.
See the full numbers in our case studies, or how we work with restaurants and bars specifically. Benchmarks from 13 of our client accounts are in our 2026 benchmark report.
