Restaurant Hashtags – Instagram Hashtags For Restaurants & Food

Restaurant Hashtags – Instagram Hashtags For Restaurants & Food are not a great fit.  Especially for a single location bar or restaurant.  If you have a national brand and could potentially be found in any city in the US like McDonald’s for example, hashtags are awesome and work well.  For the rest of us, hashtags are meaningless.  They do NOT drive traffic into your local bar or restaurant.  Here is a post I did on this subject years ago on Restaurant Hashtags and it remains true today, if not worse.

In all my years of research I’ve NEVER seen or heard of a single instance where a customer found a restaurant or bar through use of a hashtag.  On any platform.  Not once.  Hashtags are like the marketing lottery.  Rarely do they pay off in real life yet some people cling to them like gospel and refuse to calculate the chances of an actual payoff.  With the Hashtag Lottery however, when and if they do payoff and a group walks in your door, the “lottery winnings” are something like 40 bucks or whatever your check average is.

Now that there are consequences we need to rethink our approach

If your Instagram account gets shadowbanned, everything looks fine on your end.  Yet your traffic and engagement continues to drop off.  Instagram has censored the reach of your hashtags to only include the people following your page. This of course defeats the purpose of a hashtag altogether.  Don’t EVER copy/ pate a series of hashtags.  This is seen as an extremely spammy approach and WILL get your post’s visibility reduced dramatically.

At the end of the day, the message is simple.  Provide great, entertaining content.  Don’t try to cheat the system.  Don’t try to get mediocre content out to even more people through the use of hashtags.  Remember – Marketing isn’t spreading hashtags and increasing engagement if the people seeing your message aren’t potential customers!