Social Media Management for Hospitality, Food & Drink — The Practitioner’s Playbook.

SectionThe honest reframe most social agencies won't tell you

Most agencies running social for restaurants, gastropubs, cafes and hotels treat the channel like a digital menu board — a static dish photo on a Tuesday, a stock-image quote graphic on a Thursday, a "join us this weekend" tile on a Friday, posted from the same template across Facebook, Instagram and the occasional reluctant TikTok. Then they wonder why the bookings still come from Tripadvisor and OpenTable, why the DMs go un-answered for two days, and why the FSA hygiene rating screenshot does more for the brand in a weekend than a quarter of static posts.

Hospitality, food and drink is not a static-photo category. It is a taste-led, trust-led, review-and-yield-driven market where the buyer wants to see the chef plate the dish, hear the grower talk about the heritage tomato, watch the kitchen at 7pm on a Saturday, read three live owner-responses to recent Tripadvisor reviews, and check the FSA rating before they even think about pressing book. Generic agencies do not produce that content. They have never been on a pass at service, never plated a dish, never walked a supplier's farm, never managed a hotel's ADR through a quiet midweek. So they ship templated tiles and call it a content programme.

This playbook fixes that. Chef-led vertical video is the engine. Supplier-story content is the proof. Behind-the-scenes kitchen footage is the trust differential. Review-amplification, allergen-aware copy and hotel ADR-aware comms are the conversion lever. Read it, run it yourself, or have us ship it on retainer.

SectionThe eight-point audit we run on day one

Score your own social stack red / amber / green this week.

1. Chef-led video content (vertical-first on Instagram, TikTok and Reels) — Vertical video built around the chef or head of kitchen, 30–90 seconds, captioned, native to TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. A dish being plated. A new menu walkthrough. A signature sauce being built. Not a still photo with a Boomerang of steam, not a 16:9 cut of a corporate sizzle. If your feed is 90% photos and 10% video — or 100% photos — you are invisible to the under-45 buyer doing taste research on their phone over Sunday breakfast.
2. Supplier-story / farm-to-fork video content — A cadence of supplier-side content. The fishmonger landing the morning catch in Poole harbour. The grower walking a polytunnel of heritage tomatoes. The brewer pulling the first cask of a new beer. The roaster cupping a fresh-shipped Ethiopian. Cuts the provenance story into the feed and lifts both perceived value and average spend. Most operators ignore this entirely because they have never thought of the supplier as a content asset.
3. Behind-the-scenes kitchen video (service, prep, family meal, post-shift) — Honest BTS footage from the kitchen — pre-service prep at 4pm, the pass at 7.30pm Saturday, family meal, the team unwinding at the end of a double. Builds the emotional connection between the buyer and the people who actually feed them, and is the single highest-trust content type in hospitality. Done well it carries a brand for years.
4. Tripadvisor-style review-amplification on social — A programme that takes the best new Tripadvisor, OpenTable, Google and Booking.com reviews and re-publishes them as native social content — quote tiles, video stitches with the chef reading the review, before-and-after dish shots tied to the specific praise. Closes the loop between aggregator review velocity and own-channel social proof, and converts your existing review goodwill into discovery-stage content for new buyers.
5. Allergen-aware copy (Natasha's Law and full ingredient transparency) — Captions, dish-feature posts, menu-launch reels and DM responses written with full Natasha's Law alertness. The 14 named allergens flagged where relevant. Cross-contamination risk addressed honestly. "Please tell us on arrival" replaced with proactive call-outs. Most operators are quietly non-compliant in social copy and one screenshotted misstatement is a regulator letter and a brand event nobody can afford.
6. Hotel ADR-aware yield comms (off-peak push and shoulder-season fills) — For hotels and B&Bs, social content tied to actual ADR, occupancy and shoulder-season yield. Tuesday-night midweek breaks. Sunday-night-stay-Monday-checkout offers. February half-term family rooms. November dog-friendly weekends. Posted with revenue-management input, not creative input alone. Most hotel social runs on holiday-pretty content with no yield logic and the GM cannot trace a single booking back to a specific post.
7. Instagram + TikTok + Pinterest priority for visual discovery — The right channel weighting for a visual-discovery category. Instagram for the visual brand and the booking-intent buyer. TikTok for the dish-discovery and chef-personality reach. Pinterest for the wedding, function, special-occasion and travel buyer who plans 3–9 months ahead. Facebook downgraded to community-and-events. LinkedIn reserved for hotel B2B and corporate-functions only. Most operators invert this and starve the channels that actually shift covers and rooms.
8. Community management SLA on review responses and enquiry DMs — A response-time SLA on inbound DMs, comments and aggregator review replies. Target: under 60 minutes during service-adjacent hours, under 4 hours overnight, named-team responses on Tripadvisor / Google / Booking.com reviews where appropriate. Most operators reply to DMs in 24–72 hours and to bad reviews not at all. The buyer has already DM'd two competitors and booked one of them by hour six. The lead bleed and the reputation bleed are invisible until you instrument them.

Three or more reds — fix the foundation before you spend a pound on paid amplification.

SectionSix productised deliverables we ship per cycle

Chef-led video cadence. A recurring production cycle that puts your chef, head of kitchen or senior pass on camera in vertical, 30–90 second formats native to TikTok, Reels and Shorts. Two to four shoot days a month, batch-captured around real service prep, real menu changes, real supplier deliveries. Edited, captioned, hooked, and scheduled across the channel-fit map. The chef becomes a recognisable face in the feed — the buyer hears the same voice twice and the trust meter ticks. Time to first signal: 20–40 days as the algorithm learns the page profile and serves your content into food, restaurant and travel feeds. Owned by you, exported with the shot-list SOP, the caption template, the allergen-aware copy library and the editing brief.

Supplier-story content. A monthly cadence of supplier-side content — the boat, the farm, the brewery, the dairy, the smokehouse, the roaster, the orchard. Filmed on a half-day visit, cut into one 4–8 minute piece for YouTube and Instagram in-feed, plus four to six vertical clips for Reels, TikTok and Shorts. Tagged into the dishes that use the produce. The provenance story is the single highest-margin lever in independent hospitality — it lifts perceived value, supports a higher menu price, and turns the supplier into a co-marketer who shares your content to their own audience. Time to first signal: 30–60 days as the supplier audience compounds with your own.

Behind-the-scenes kitchen video. A weekly cadence of honest BTS footage shot inside the kitchen — pre-service prep, mid-service pass, family meal, end-of-shift wind-down, the inevitable Saturday-night chaos. Vertical, captioned, posted native to TikTok and Reels with weekly long-cuts on YouTube. Builds the emotional brand layer that static dish photos never reach. Tone is honest, occasionally rough, never over-produced — buyers can spot a sanitised studio shoot inside three seconds and they bounce. The asset that carries your brand through quiet months and pays back disproportionately when a piece breaks reach.

Review-amplification programme. A weekly process that pulls the best new Tripadvisor, OpenTable, Google and Booking.com reviews and re-publishes them as native social content — quote tiles, video stitches with the chef reading the review, dish-shot pairings, room-walkthrough pairings for hotels. Includes a same-week owner response on the originating platform with a named team member and a specific reference back to the dish, room or service mentioned. Closes the loop between aggregator review velocity and own-channel social proof and converts your existing goodwill into top-of-funnel reach. Time to first signal: 14–28 days — review-driven content is among the fastest-converting formats in hospitality.

Hotel ADR-aware yield comms. For hotels, B&Bs and venues with rooms, a content track tied to revenue management — not just brand. Midweek-break content posted into the Tuesday-night ADR softness. Sunday-night-stay-Monday-checkout offers timed to the actual gap on the booking sheet. February-half-term family-room reels. Shoulder-season dog-friendly weekend campaigns. November and January off-peak fills. Built in collaboration with the revenue manager (or the GM running yield) so the content directly addresses the rooms that need to move, with proper UTM and Booking.com / SiteMinder deep-linking so the GM can see exactly which posts drove which bookings. Removes the eternal "what is social actually worth to us" problem.

Community management SLA. A response-time SLA on every channel — DMs, comments, post replies, story replies, Tripadvisor reviews, Google reviews, Booking.com reviews, OpenTable feedback. Service-adjacent hours target: under 60 minutes. Overnight target: under 4 hours. Named-team responses on aggregator reviews, especially on negative ones. Allergen-aware copy library so any food-safety question is handled correctly first time. Monthly reporting on response-time distribution, conversation-to-booking rate, and DM-to-cover conversion. The unsexy lever that most operators ignore and that turns content traction into actual booked covers and rooms. Time to first signal: immediate — booked-cover and DM-to-booking numbers move in the first 30 days.

SectionWhat to do this week

Three actions, ranked by leverage.

1. Film one chef-led vertical video on your next service prep. Owner: head chef or sous chef. Time: 15 minutes between mise-en-place and service. Phone in vertical, three clips of 20–30 seconds — the dish being built, a piece of supplier provenance ("this beef comes from…"), a one-line plating thought. Caption it, post it native to Instagram Reels and TikTok. Resist the temptation to over-light or over-edit. Authenticity outperforms polish in this category by a wide margin.
2. Audit your last 30 days of DM and review response times. Owner: front-of-house manager or marketing manager. Time: 45 minutes. Pull every inbound DM across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, plus every Tripadvisor, Google and Booking.com review from the last month. Note the timestamp of each inbound and the timestamp of the first useful reply. If the median DM response is over 4 working hours, or your review response rate is under 80%, you are bleeding warm bookings and reputational capital to faster competitors and the fix is operational, not creative.
3. Decide DIY, DWY or DFY for the next 90 days. Owner: founder or operator. See the three ways.

SectionFive questions hospitality operators ask us about social

What's the realistic ROI on chef-led video versus our current static-post programme? Chef-led vertical video typically lifts impressions 5–10x against a static-photo baseline within 60 days, lifts profile-visit rate 3–6x, and lifts DM volume 2–4x. The downstream metric that matters — DM and link-tap to booked cover or booked room — improves more modestly (10–25%) but on a much larger base, so direct bookings from organic social often double or triple in the first 90 days. Cost per booked cover from social settles around £1.50–£4 once the cycle stabilises, against £6–£15 from cold paid; for hotel rooms it settles around £8–£18 against £30–£70 cold. The chef themselves becomes the most valuable asset in the marketing stack.

Supplier-story content — does the farm-to-fork stuff actually move covers, or is it just brand? It moves both, and it moves price more than covers. A documented supplier-story programme typically supports a 5–12% lift in average spend per cover within two quarters because the buyer can articulate why the dish costs what it costs and why it is worth it. It also recruits the supplier as a co-marketer — the farm shares to its audience, the brewery shares to its audience, the roaster shares to its audience, and you inherit a slice of every supplier audience you film. Combined with the menu-engineering work, it is the highest-margin content track in independent hospitality.

Review amplification — won't re-posting Tripadvisor reviews look needy? Done well, no. Done as a quote tile with a stock food photo, yes. The format that works is a chef-led vertical video where the chef reads the review on camera with a half-grin, then cuts to the actual dish being built or the actual room being turned. It celebrates the customer, celebrates the team, and gives you a 30-second piece of social proof that is functionally impossible to fake. Combined with a same-week named owner response on the originating platform, it tightens the loop between aggregator velocity and your own channel reach without ever feeling promotional.

Hotel content — how do we tie social to actual ADR and occupancy without it becoming a sale-y feed? The trick is to lead with the experience and finish with the offer. A 60-second reel of a dog-friendly Sunday-stay-Monday-checkout package is mostly the dog, mostly the breakfast room, mostly the coastal walk — and the rate sits in the caption with a single deep-link to Booking.com or your direct widget with proper UTM tagging. Run those reels into the actual midweek and shoulder-season softness on the booking sheet, in collaboration with the revenue manager. Most hotels see direct-booking share lift 4–8 percentage points within two quarters, which on most P&Ls more than pays for the entire content programme.

Can we run this ourselves with the playbook + £750 audit? Yes for restaurants, gastropubs, cafes, micro-breweries and small B&Bs with a competent marketing manager and a chef willing to spend 30–60 minutes on camera per week. Larger hotels with full revenue-management cycles and PMS / channel-manager integration usually need DWY support for the ADR-aware yield comms and the booking-platform deep-linking. The £750 audit gives you a written red/amber/green of all eight points, a prioritised next-step list with named owners and dates, the chef-led shot-list SOPs, the allergen-aware caption library, the supplier-story brief, the review-amplification SOP, and the channel-fit map. Credit toward first cycle if you sign for DWY/DFY within 30 days.

SectionWhere to go from here

If you want this shipped end-to-end on a productised retainer, book a 30-minute discovery call.

If you'd rather have a senior practitioner reviewing your chef-led cadence, supplier-story plan, review-amplification programme and DM SLA each week, the coaching plans start at £750/month. If you have a hard deadline — a menu rebrand, a pre-summer launch on the coast, a new-room or refurb-room reveal, a Christmas-party content sprint, a beer-launch week, a hotel re-launch — the two-week embedded sprint lands a senior practitioner in your account for ten working days at £3,000 fixed.

Or run it yourself. Eight-point audit + one deliverable a month + twice-quarterly office hours.