Here's the key to social media ROI

Given how visually driven social media is, it's essential to have good photos that catch customers'—and prospective customers'—eyes. But taking good photos is hard, especially if you don't have any training. Where should you take the photos? When? How many? How often?

Enter Rob Austin, who has a background in photography and videography and now runs marketing for Leader Bar in Chicago. We picked Rob's brain for easy tips (that anyone can do) on how to take great social media photos, and he gave us nine great ones:

1. Take photos on a sunny day and use indirect natural light. For Rob, the ideal bar photo is this: in indirect light, take a photo of the food/beer/whatever with the bar in the background, drenched in that natural light.
2. If you have a good photo-taking place or two in your bar, stick with it. Don't force variety for photo location—the important thing is that you take good photos, not that you're taking them in different places around the bar.
3. Schedule a photoshoot. When Rob sees a good weather day (clear and sunny) coming, he'll coordinate with the chef to just go to town and rack up photos of everything he needs. This way, the next time he wants/needs to post he doesn't have to scramble to take a photo on a crappy weather day. He's already got the photo(s) he needs.
4. Depth of field part 1: Show the subject of the photo up front. The bar should be in the background, but not crystal clear—you want a photo where you can tell there’s a bar in the background and see there’s a TV, but not be able to read the tap handles or see who's playing the baseball game that's on the TV. That stuff is distracting.
5. Depth of field part 2: adjust if necessary. if you’re shooting a plate of food, tilt the back of the plate up by setting it on something that's like an inch tall. Much higher than that and it looks weird, and lower than that and you can't really get an idea of how delicious the thing on the plate is.
6. Don't take just 1 or 2 photos of the thing you need. Take a minimum of 30, with slightly different perspectives and angles. Cover your bases here to make sure you get a great photo—it's not like you're going to run out of room for your photos.
7. Put all your photos into a Google Drive folder. If they're in the cloud, you can always access them if you're in a hurry, if your phone dies or gets lost, etc. It also means others can access them, so you don't have to post if you're on vacation.
8. You can reuse a photo, but only if its been a little while. We're talking a few months.
9. Need inspiration? Follow the examples of other social media profiles that you think do a good job. There's a brewery near Rob—Old Irving Brewery—that he looks to for inspiration. Surely there's someone near you who's doing a good job. What do you like about their photos? ID that and then try to capture it in your next photoshoot.

For more from Rob about taking great social media photos, check out the interview clip:

And for more service industry marketing advice from Rob, check out this playlist of all Rob's videos on our Youtube channel.

Why?

To instill confidence in customers that your menu is accurate, which can increase sales.

Beer drinkers have learned not to trust menus at places with rotating selections. We’ve been burned too many times by “oh, sorry, that keg kicked yesterday” to really trust the accuracy of the paper in front of us.

One way you can combat that jaded feeling is by time-stamping your menu with an “Updated on [date]” footer, header, or subheader. It’s a simple addition that can remove any of the negative feelings customers (and bartenders) get when a menu-listed beer isn’t actually available.

How?

First off, only do this if you’re actually providing an up-to-date menu (no "ask or server about rotating drafts" or similar) and your selection rotates regularly (at least a couple times per month). A time stamp from a month ago isn’t additive.

If you are providing an up-to-date menu and your selection regularly rotates, then just add a timestamp—e.g. ”Updated August 17”—to your menu.

You could do this manually—drop it into the footer or subheader of your menu doc. Going forward, make sure editing the time stamp is a part of your menu updating process. (It's easy to forget when you're moving quickly.)

• What's the Surgeon General's warning about alcohol going to mean? Last week the Surgeon General called for cancer warnings to be placed on all alcoholic beverages, similar to those placed on cigarettes. I'm skeptical anything will come of it in the near term—congress would have to act to make it happen—but it understandably caused quite a stir in all parts of the industry, and at the very least made for a challenging news cycle. This is one we'll definitely be keeping an eye on.
• Jimmy Carter: 39th president and father of the modern craft brewing world? As Jimmy Carter gets honored across the country for a long and well-lived life, brewers of all stripes have joined the chorus. Though evidently not really a beer man himself, Carter did sign the bill that legalized homebrewing in the US. Given the wide pipeline from homebrewing to professional brewing that powered the rise of craft beer, the beer industry as we know it wouldn't have been possible without him.
• Beer journalist Josh Bernstein shares some insights in NY Times. Long a producer of high quality content, it was interesting to see an interview with him.
• Find the Golden Beer Can, get free beer for a year. No doubt there's some space in the middle of Venn diagram of beer lovers and scavenger hunt lovers. Those folks are in for a treat in St. Paul, where Saint Paul Brewing has hidden a Golden Beer Can on public land. The person who finds it gets free beer for a year.