Be Direct! Restaurant Social Media Posts to Drive Customer Engagement in Times of Crisis and Beyond

Abstract

Restaurants were significantly shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced them to intensify their use of social media to communicate with customers. Our objective was to identify which digital marketing strategies generated higher customer engagement during the pandemic, according to variations in the intensity of sanitary restrictions. We manually extracted 639 Facebook posts by 16 restaurants in two Canadian cities (one in a metropolitan area, one in a peripheral region), and coded them according to type of verbal move, format (image, text), and emoji use. The engagement rate was two times higher for restaurants in the metropolitan area, which also used three times more emojis per post on average. The engagement rate was also five times higher for nationally branded restaurants than for independent restaurants. When the pandemic hit, restaurants started to use more text and more directive verbal moves to convey crucial and precise information to customers, notably about sanitary restrictions. Emojis and expressive verbal moves also helped increase customer engagement. While being direct was more efficient in times of crisis, directive verbal moves continued to be used after most sanitary restrictions were lifted. Being direct, thus, appears to be a good digital marketing strategy in the “new normal”.