How to get your restaurant discovered on Facebook
Over 1.5 billion people use Facebook Messenger every month to connect with friends and businesses. But as a restaurant owner, you might have already given up on using Facebook to drive new business to your restaurant.
After all, with constant algorithm changes that affect how many of your followers are seeing your posts, and more and more of your customers spending most of their time on platforms like Instagram, what’s the point in investing more time in something that hasn’t worked in the past?
Luckily there’s a new way of getting discovered by new potential customers on Facebook Messenger. It requires only a couple minutes of work to setup, and after that you can set it and forget it. It’s called Facebook Discover.
Facebook understands that your restaurant might not be getting as many new customer interactions as you’d like through its platform, so it’s been experimenting aggressively with new ways to let you connect with potential customers. But they also understand that restaurant owners don’t have time to be sitting around waiting to reply to customer messages in real time.
That’s why they created Facebook Discover — it’s a portion of Facebook Messenger that is entirely dedicated to helping people learn about chatbots.
Discover is a relatively new part of the Facebook Messenger mobile app that lets users easily discover new chatbots that are either relevant to their interests or geographically close to them. Being featured on Discover opens your restaurant up to an entirely new audience of relevant customers who are in your area.
First things first — you’ll need to have a chatbot connected to your restaurant’s Facebook page. Don’t worry, you won’t need to spend hours researching what a chatbot is, let alone how to create one for your restaurant. We created Guestfriend to let restaurant owners create and add their own customized chatbot (or “virtual host”) to their Facebook page in about 2 minutes.
Just click here, type your restaurant, and follow a few easy steps to get set up.
Alright, now that you’ve added your chatbot to your page, what next?
First, follow this link when you’re logged into Facebook and have added your chatbot to your page. Once you land on the page, click “Submit Your Messenger Bot” (see below).
Next, you’re going to want to select your restaurant’s page from the list of pages that show up. Once you select your restaurant’s page, you’ll be directed to a new page. Scroll down to the “Discover Settings” section at the bottom of the page and click Set Up.
Facebook will then ask you to write a description of your chatbot. If you’re using Guestfriend, you can use something like this:
Our restaurant chatbot provides all of the information that a potential guest would be interested in learning about before visiting. Guests first get a personalized welcome message and then can ask a wide range of questions, (either typing in questions themselves or using quick reply buttons). They can learn about our menu and browse through images of our food and cocktails (our bot is even smart enough to suggest dishes based on the types of food that they ask about). They can also make reservations without leaving Facebook Messenger, through our integrations with OpenTable, Resy, Yelp, and Reserve. Our bot also can answer questions about 60 other categories. Our bot intelligently pulls information from all of our social media accounts and our website.
Next, you’ll need to choose your chatbot’s categories. We suggest Food & Drink for your Primary category and Travel for your Secondary channel.
Finally, you’ll get to write the Overview for your bot that will show up next to your chatbot’s icon when someone sees it on their Discover tab. We suggest “Browse our menu and make a reservation!”
Then click Submit and you’re done!
Facebook is devoting lots of resources to building automated messaging into its platform, and by using a chatbot on your Facebook page and submitting your bot to Discover now, you’ll be way ahead of the curve when more businesses start to do the same thing (and when more customers start turning to Facebook to interact with and learn about new restaurants).
Let us know if you have any questions about getting verified on Discover, and if you’re ready to get discovered by new customers right now, create your restaurant’s chatbot on Guestfriend in 2 minutes.
