Your Guide To Boost Engagement With 17 Restaurant Instagram Marketing Strategies

Most restaurant owners know they need to be on Instagram, but few really understand what success on Instagram actually looks like.

In this restaurant Instagram marketing guide, I’ll teach you everything you need to know to attract real, paying customers to your restaurant.

This is a step-by-step playbook that you can do yourself or hire someone to do for you.

I’ll show you what restaurant Instagram marketing looks like and walk you through every step you need to take to see engagement turn into profitable success. Here are the strategies you should include in Instagram marketing for restaurants:

1. Set up your profile the right way

Your profile consists of your username, name, picture and description. It’s the most important real estate in your Instagram presence, and so it’s worth thinking twice about what you display there.

Talkin’ Tacos provides a great example of how to set up your profile the right way.

Some of the things they do right:

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• Using their brand name as your Instagram profile name
• Using their logo as their Instagram profile picture
• Including a brief description of what they offer, location addresses, website link and a call-to-action (CTA), like how to order, in their Instagram bio

If you have multiple locations, keep your username generic and avoid mentioning a location. Using one account that focuses on the brand rather than the location will help you grow your account, and then Instagram’s algorithm will put your account in front of people in your area.

2. Engage with your followers

Followers love seeing a brand interact with them, which makes them want to engage with you more often, order from your restaurant and even join your loyalty program. 

If your followers tag your profile in posts or stories, interact with their posts by liking, commenting and/or re-posting them. They appreciate that you’re noticing them and giving them more exposure to a wider audience. 

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You should also reply to every comment… or as many as you realistically can if you get too many comments. If you are getting 100 total comments per week, you are getting great engagement and you can easily reply to every single one of those comments in less than an hour. 

These don’t need to be long, drawn-out comments—quick replies like these are totally fine, but if you have time to be even more personal and engaging in the comments, go for it!

3. Post appealing food pictures every day

Urgency can be powerful, but at the end of the day, consistency is what establishes your restaurant’s reputation in the community—consistently good food. And consistently getting that food in front of people.

The more people see your food, the more often they are going to come to your restaurant. Period.

This is why the staple of any successful larger social media marketing plan with an Instagram strategy for restaurants is simply to post a picture of your food every single day or at least 5-6 days per week.

You don’t need professional photos since every modern smartphone on the market has a high enough camera quality to produce great photos for restaurant Instagram posts. Just make sure you have a light source pointing at the food you are photographing, and you’re good to go.

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Every time a follower—whether they’re a potential or repeat customer—sees this food, they are that much closer to coming into your restaurant.

Consistency over time is how you build any restaurant marketing channel, and it’s the exact same for driving revenue to your restaurant using Instagram.

4. Promote direct online ordering

Part of how to market a restaurant on social media includes promoting the things you offer that appeal to your followers and can make their lives easier—most importantly, direct online ordering. 

Once you’ve developed your online ordering offering, share what makes it helpful on your Instagram. Spotlight unique features, share tips and tell your followers how it’s convenient for them. 

Like I said before, make sure you include a direct link to your online ordering in your Instagram profile description so followers can always easily find and use it!

5. Write attention-grabbing captions with relevant hashtags

The best Instagram restaurant captions are ones that grab the attention of people scrolling through their feed but are still on brand for your business. If it’s not on brand, choose another option that is or change it up to fit your style!

Some examples include:

• [Food name] goals
• [Food emoji] [food name]
• #Foodgoals
• The place to be
• Our happy place

Don’t be afraid to include emojis (or just use emojis) in your caption. What you absolutely should include, however, are relevant hashtags. 

The right hashtags can get your post in front of even more potential customers. Include a mix of broad hashtags (like #foodie), specific hashtags (like #margaritapizza) and location-based hashtags (like #littleitalynyc).   

6. Feature your restaurant’s branding

Branding should always play a key role in how to do restaurant marketing, especially online. Mix up your restaurant’s social media feed by including snippets of your branding in Instagram photos. Branding can be in the background of your food photo or visible on a glass, coaster, apparel or signage. 

Again, as I mentioned earlier, you should set your logo as your Instagram profile picture for easy brand identification.

7. Use (live) video

Another restaurant marketing tool you should feature on your Instagram feed is video—especially going live on video occasionally. 

Creating and sharing videos gives your followers another format to view multiple menu items and see people interacting in your restaurant. Going live on Instagram gives you an extra sense of authenticity with followers as they get a raw preview of your restaurant's vibe. 

Some ideas of what you should capture on video include:

• How a popular menu item is made
• Interviews with staff
• A busy night
• A special event
• Tour of a new/seasonal space (i.e., patio or rooftop) 

8. Set up a selfie station

This is one of those strategies that feels difficult, undoable or unnecessary, but it’s none of those things.

Every restaurant needs a selfie station for visual appeal and for authentic customer engagement. 

Look at how simple this example from Café La Jefa is, look at how little space it takes up, and LOOK AT HOW MANY PEOPLE ADVERTISE THE CAFE WITH THEIR SELFIES!!!

That is all user-generated content (the type you should be commenting on and re-posting for increased engagement!)—and you can scroll for days. Selfie stations work... like crazy, end of story.

The best part? You can literally do the bare minimum and still get great results. You don’t need to create a whole sitting area, just find a small corner or slice of your existing wall, throw up some fake ivy and most importantly, get a neon sign.

You can do this for a few hundred bucks, and it will pay that back exponentially. Selfie stations immediately turn your visitors into advertisers for your restaurant… forever.

9. Have fun with trends

Trends are an important part of social media engagement. 

Maybe you’re jumping on the latest large social media trend (a la the AI-generated action figures that took over in early 2025) or the latest food trends (remember the height of the crazy milkshake trend at the end of the 2010s?). Either way, you need to stay in touch with what’s happening and what's popular. 

If a trend aligns with your brand, get your creative energy flowing! Make it your own as much as possible and use the trend as a way to drive engagement and interest that will convert into visits and sales.  

10. Include your team in creatives

Extend the creativity to include your ultimate stakeholders—your team members! Collect their ideas, feature them in photos and share their stories (all with their permission). 

Juniper and Ivy in San Diego is especially good at this and has grown its Instagram account to over 40,000 followers with a wide variety of engaging posts.

The photos they post of their staff are especially “human,” like in these two restaurant Instagram post ideas for including your team:

Have a physical/digital location or an open forum where your employees can share ideas. Often, the best ideas are born out of collective experience and brainstorming!

11. Share specials and events

Does your restaurant run weekly specials? Do you have an event space or hold special events (i.e., wedding/baby showers, vendor fairs, trivia, holiday-themed events)? Promote all of these on your Instagram!

Sharing a graphic with specials, a flyer for your event or examples of your set-up will attract additional customers to your restaurant for these occasions and boost your sales.  

12. Time your posts correctly

Timing is everything, and social media for restaurants is no exception. Try to consistently post on your restaurant’s Instagram just before and during lunch and dinner services (breakfast too if that’s what you’re serving!). 

You should check your Instagram user analytics on your Meta Business Profile to see what specific times most of your followers engage with your content, and post accordingly. 

When it comes to sharing weekly specials or events, make sure you’re posting that information at the beginning of the week with stories that share reminders throughout the week so your followers can make plans. 

Be sure that your social media marketing plan mirrors any automated marketing plans you have in place so your entire marketing strategy is seamless and coordinated.

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13. Create strategic story highlights 

If you don’t post Stories regularly, you probably don’t have your Story Highlights setup—and that’s a huge bummer. Unlike posting Stories every day, Story Highlights only need to be set up ONCE.

You CAN add to them over time, and you should, but there’s a handful of “evergreen” stories that you can record and pin to the top of your profile as highlights in one go, and they will continue benefiting your restaurant forever.

Here’s a great example of optimal Story Highlights from Talkin’ Tacos.

There’s a few reasons this setup is optimal:

• Each category name is short and clearly readable.
• It immediately answers important questions that lead to orders (ex. When are you open? Where are you located? What’s on your menu?).
• It shows off social proof from customers (and even includes celebrity customers, although that’s not essential if you don’t have any)
• It has nicely designed icons for each Highlight category.

You can also take a simpler approach that pins Stories featuring exceptional customer feedback and highlights your most popular menu items. What’s important is that you’re doing something and it feels authentic to your brand. 

14. Team up with (local) influencers

When you think of influencers, you probably think of accounts with tens of thousands or millions of followers. In reality, an account doesn’t need to have a mass following to be influential—these accounts are called micro-influencers, and working with them can have a massive impact on your traffic and sales. 

Finding micro-influencers in your local community adds authenticity to the partnership, especially if they’ve already been to your restaurant multiple times and engaged with your Instagram. 

Select a handful of these local micro-influencers and provide incentives for them to become regulars and share their experience with their followers to see the true impact on your business.

15. Monitor your inbox

To keep follower engagement high, it’s important for you to regularly check your inbox for direct messages (DMs). Potential customers can use DMs to ask questions about making reservations, menu items and allergy accommodations—missing these and not responding can mean losing out on a potential customer. 

If you’re not following the account, these DMs can be hiding in your message requests. Make sure you’re also regularly checking the requests so you don’t miss an important opportunity!

16. Compose your presentation

Presentation matters, especially on Instagram! Even photos you take on your smartphone and upload to the restaurant's social media platform must be compelling and visually appealing to entice followers to actually convert into customers. 

Think: mouth-watering images, vibrant colors, chilled glasses dripping with condensation. 

These all lure the viewer in and make them want to try it for themselves. 

17. Explore paid ads

While organic growth can help you make massive gains in engagement and sales, paid advertising can take things to the next level by sharing your brand with a wider audience. In recent years, ambitious restaurateurs have found that paid advertising can help growth happen significantly faster.

Nicole Rogers, social media manager for Juniper and Ivy and The Crack Shack, told us the following:

‍Organic Instagram for businesses is becoming increasingly tough with their ever-changing algorithm that prioritizes influencer and paid content. With that, we don’t use organic Instagram as a tactic for broad reach, but rather a platform to engage with lower-funnel megafans, execute our brand voice and share promotions only when necessary. 

If you look at our posts, we don’t say things like “Come by for happy hour!” but more “normal,” funny captions that you’d see from one of your friends.  Our brand tone is bold and can toe the line of inappropriateness, and Instagram is a great platform on which to showcase that—your followers probably already know about your brand, so you don’t need to provide basic information. 

We use paid social campaigns to capture that upper-funnel audience and bring new people through the door through more awareness messaging, and measure success based on the goal of the campaign (reach, clicks, engagement or conversions).

While we've seen many restaurants using the organic strategies in this guide to drive tangible restaurant growth, we also know that adding in advertising dollars in the way Nicole outlined can rapidly accelerate growth, making paid ads an important component of any restaurant’s Instagram marketing strategy. 

Case study: Is Instagram having THIS level of impact on your restaurant?

Now that you know the steps you should be taking to drive growth on Instagram, let’s look at the real, tangible impact Instagram is having on a restaurant that has succeeded with this marketing channel.

This is Talkin’ Tacos in Miami, Florida.

While this restaurant doesn’t drive a large percentage of orders directly through Instagram, they’ve used Instagram as more of a branding tool to connect with their community and generate a massive amount of referral business. 

Their growth to over 194,000 Instagram followers has correlated with their fast-paced growth to 25 locations in just five years of business. Learn exactly how Talkin’ Tacos scaled its business by reading our Restaurant Growth Handbook.

How would your business be different if you had tens (or hundreds) of thousands of Instagram followers to share your restaurant promotions with? How would your business be different if you were bringing in extra revenue directly through Instagram?

These types of results are what’s possible when you get serious about Instagram marketing for your restaurant.

And the best part is that there’s not a ton of effort required to knock this marketing channel out of the park.

It’s really just a matter of setting things up correctly, authentically engaging, giving your followers quality content and completing a few simple steps each week (steps you can complete yourself or very easily outsource).

Drive success with restaurant Instagram marketing strategies

Marketing your restaurant on Instagram provides you with a direct line to reach current and potential customers. Using some, or all, of the above restaurant Instagram marketing strategies will help you boost engagement and convert followers into customers, boosting traffic and profits. 

Make sure your restaurant’s marketing reaches its full potential by using Owner.com's restaurant website builder. Integrate your Instagram feed live on your website so visitors can see your strategy at work in multiple locations. 

Restaurant Instagram marketing FAQ

Want to know more about how your restaurant can have an effective presence on Instagram? Get answers to some FAQs below:

What’s the best time to post on Instagram for restaurants?

Generally speaking, you should be posting on your restaurant’s Instagram a couple of hours before people go to lunch and dinner, as well as during those busy times. This would be about 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m. for lunch and 3-8 p.m. for dinner. 

However, there’s really no universal “best” time to post on Instagram as a restaurant. What’s best for your restaurant could completely differ from what's best for the one next door. 

Use Instagram’s Meta Business Suite to check your specific analytics and see when your followers are online and engaging with your content, then tailor your posting schedule to fit their behavior. 

How often should restaurants post on Instagram?

On average, you should aim to post on your main feed about five times per week, with two or three Stories daily. Again, this will vary from restaurant to restaurant. Check your engagement numbers to see if you’re posting too much or not enough. 

What are the key content pillars for restaurants on Instagram?

Key content pillars for restaurants on Instagram include:

• Menu highlights
• Customer testimonials
• Chef stories
• Promotions
• Behind-the-scenes insights

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