Curating the perfect Instagram feed

A huge part of restaurant marketing and social media is understanding your client’s brand. That includes colour palette, tone of voice, photographic style, ethos, the list goes on… When you are trying to curate an Instagram account, aesthetics are everything. You have to create a feed that looks great and is a visual representation of the brand.

I usually start with a mood board, this is something the client can put together to get the ball rolling and will mainly act as a rough guide to build their visuals for social. Pinterest is a great place to start! This will include a few feeds that they love and why they like them, examples of photographic style and content ideas. Restaurant social media relies heavily on consistency and that doesn’t actually have anything to do with using great equipment or taking high quality photos. A lot of the best restaurant Instagram accounts are shot on an iPhone, customer view photo of each dish and nothing else, at least it is consistent.

After we have decided on all of these elements I will then create an example feed to present to the client. This is a great chance for them to see how the content will look all together, if the colour palette works for them and if there is anything missing that they might like to add. This element of forward planning is vital to restaurant marketing, although you may not be using Instagram as a promotional tool and just for visuals, you need to maintain strong brand aesthetics over all social media platforms.

All the planning is done, everything has been signed off and now you just need to make it a reality. One of the hardest parts of being a photographer and content creator working over so many different accounts and visual identities is being able to separate one style from another. For example, with our new client X-UPPER we had agreed on a desaturated feed, lots of monochrome with a dash of colour and a selection of graphics from Emily (our in-house graphic designer) to break up the content. Although the composition of these images isn’t too dissimilar to other clients we have, the edit will be very different and time-consuming.  Wild Rice for example wholeheartedly relies on photographic content, and the composition and style of the imagery couldn’t be further away from anything we do for any of our other clients.

For more information on our content creation and examples of our work head to our Instagram page!