So, you’re a restaurant (or, a food-selling establishment of some sort) and you want to share your menu with the internet. Which is a great call, considering 89% of consumers will do some online reconnaissance before dining out. As with many things on the web, there are countless options (which can be good and bad). Where should your menus go? Here are some options to consider:

On Facebook. There is a free-mium app called Menutab for Restaurants. This app allows you to put your whole menu on Facebook, for fans and other potentially hungry people to peruse. It’s pretty handy: when someone checks your Facebook page for hours of operation or location, they can check out your menu, too!menu facebook

You can even add a thumbnail image to each menu item. Since it’s free, there are some limits with what you can do.



On Your Website. If you have a website, you 99.99% want a menu on there somewhere. I’m not sure what the 0.01% would be…maybe someone pays you a million dollars a year only if you don’t post your restaurant’s menu on your website. If that’s not the case, one important consideration with your website is making sure it’s responsive and/or mobile friendly. This advice is about more than improving your Google rankings- when a group is on the go and deciding where they want to eat, their reflex is to pull out their phones and check the menus of nearby restaurants. Think of it this way: having a mobile friendly website can lead to more feet in your doors.

How you set your menu up on your website may vary. If you just want people to see the options and prices, setting up a page for each category (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Drinks, etc) with price listings and some pictures is a standard solution. PDFs do the job, but aren’t helpful for mobile folks. Plus, once you have everything set up, it’s much easier to go in and change a price here and there rather than uploading new PDF files every time something changes (and you wouldn’t let inaccurate information sit on your website for long, right?). But, if you want to add online ordering or reservations, things become a bit trickier, and become a matter of adding software that handles these requests (OpenTable, for example).

WebsiteMenu

An example of a restaurant website that not only has a menu, but reservations and a photo gallery.

If you have a WordPress site, there are lots of different themes and plugins designed exclusively with restaurants in mind. Plugins include OpenMenu and Easy Menu Manager, both are free, and you can always upgrade later on (because, once you have an online menu going on, you’ll probably start having some extra piles of cash).

Perhaps the biggest benefit of putting your menu on your own website is that you have the most control in this jurisdiction (as opposed to Facebook or Yelp). It also opens the opportunity for some data collection, if you have Google Analytics set up, you can see what people are visiting your menu and learn a bit more about them, which you can use for marketing efforts later on.

On Yelp: If you’re on Yelp, you can add your menu to your restaurant profile. Yelp decided a few years ago to add this feature, which is just as helpful for businesses as it is for customers. You can also add pictures to your profile that show off menu items and storefront, and encourage users to add their own pictures. In one of the profile sidebars, Yelp also displays “What’s Popular Here” (based on user feedback). YelpPopular

And, fun fact: if people are looking for a restaurant and happen to be nearby, the mobile version of Yelp will put your restaurant in front of them (so to speak). Here’s an example of what a Yelp menu might look like:

YelpMenu

On Foursquare: Personally, I’ve never used/been on Foursquare, but restaurants can add their menus there (in addition to coupons and other fun offerings). Unfortunately, it’s not like Facebook or Yelp where you can add your menu directly the site. Foursquare pulls your menu information from third-party sites Locu and SinglePlatform, which means there’s an additional set-up step required. On the bright side, it seems pretty straightforward and easy to update (and yes, people do still use Foursquare).

You don’t have to be on all the things, and there are certainly places I haven’t listed in this post. Each place has it’s own benefits and a slightly different user base, so it’s worth doing a bit of research to find out what sites your customers are using. Use the resources available to you, and start putting your menus out there (well, online anyway).



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