alt Hacker NewsBut in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.
It's those things but more as questions than things they want to read. What people actually care about for a restaurant is:
"Can you tell me if the food is good?"
"Can you tell me are the staff great?"
"Can you tell me what does it cost?"
and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
People want answers that they can trust for those things. They want a trusted source to tell them the answers.
You can't really get any of those things from a Google search or a website (ignoring reviews because they're gamed to hell now). The majority of a restaurant's customers come from word-of-mouth recommendations or reputation through curated services like critics and directories especially at the top end. A good website helps for people who are visiting the area, or for restaurants that are very new and whose owners don't have a great network (or who wrongly believe a website is key to getting business), but for most restaurants the only way to drive business is to build a loyal base of people who tell their friends and colleagues about it.
If a restaurant is going to have a website at all it should be a great one, because bad websites shouldn't be a thing, but a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.
Replies
No really we want to know when it's open, what it serves, and how much it costs. The quality conversation is completely separate.
> "Can you tell me if the food is good?"
> "Can you tell me are the staff great?"
> "Can you tell me what does it cost?"
> and "Can you tell me where it is?" to an extent, especially if it's not on a major route.
A restaurant's Instagram page - which is what this post is about - does not answer these questions in any way better than a restaurant's website does.
Sadly, at least in the Netherlands, most restaurant have to pay extortionary prices to aggregator sites like The Fork and others, that most people use to find restaurants and reserve a table. In addition they are incentivised to offer reduced prices on their meals, so the algorithm ranks them higher. So dominant is the role of the aggregator that the restaurant cannot afford not to be listed, and lose the customer base that flows in through these aggregators. Having their own website is of lower concern than doing this well.
> a restaurant could happily run for decades with just an Instagram page these days and it'd make no difference to their success.
Well they still need a website with a menu and hours or I'm not going to be there. You can't view an instagram page without an account.