Social Media Marketing: How to Engage Your Food Truck Customers on Facebook

photo of a smiling young white woman looking down at her phone with overlay of animated floating Facebook likes, hearts and emoji faces emanating from the phone screen

Photo: Rawpixel

Facebook can be a critical free marketing tool for your food truck. If you don’t have the time or money to invest in creating a website for your food truck business, having a Facebook business page is probably your next best bet. 

Not sure what to post or how to get started? Let’s explore some of the ways you can keep customers engaged, and possibly attract future regulars to your truck!

Food Truck Facebook Tips

1. Share Your Location & Schedule

Share your daily location and any changes in your regular schedule. This is especially important if you don’t set up shop in the same place regularly. How can customers buy food at your truck if they can’t find it easily? If you are set up in front or in the parking lot of a business, consider tagging them in your post so potential customers can find you easily.

2. Post Food Specials

If you have a rotating menu, post your daily or weekly specials. Have a different special every day? You might want to share a brief menu for the week on Sunday or Monday so customers can plan ahead to eat at your truck on days their favorite food is being served. Follow that up with individual posts throughout the week of what the special is for each particular day.

Sharing these types of posts works especially well when you have an enticing food photo to whet your followers’ appetites.

3. Personal Updates

Post occasional personal updates about yourself or your employees, or just life around the food truck. This could include sharing big life events, new hire announcements, or photos of employees doing daily tasks with a smile. Something short and sweet will be easy to put together and showcase a personal touch.

For example, you could share a photo of a new team member and say something like, “This is Julia, the newest member of our food truck family. Her favorite food on the menu is … Welcome to the team, Julia!” Followers will enjoy getting to feel like they have an insight into operations on your food truck.

4. Food Truck Humor

Post memes or gifs that you find funny and relatable to your food. Customers will love seeing your humorous side.

5. Advertise Event Participation

Invite your followers to community events that your food truck will be participating in. Fairs, festivals, block parties, and holiday celebrations are all fair game. Posting a few times in the month leading up to the event is a great way to build anticipation and maximize your reach. In these posts, be sure and tag the organization putting on the event to get even more eyes on your content.

6. Get Customer Feedback

Post surveys for customer feedback: voting on upcoming menu specials, giving feedback about their customer experience at your truck, getting suggestions for people with dietary restrictions or kids, etc. The most engagement on posts occurs when you give the customer a question to answer that is relevant to them in some way.

This kills two birds with one stone: it gets your customers thinking about your truck and your food, and it also gives you helpful information that you can use to better tailor your food truck operations. Getting customer feedback will help you provide the best possible customer experience, which will in turn get you more business in the long run.

7. Use Hashtags to Expand Your Reach

Use relevant hashtags to make your content more easily searchable on Facebook and other social platforms you might use. This will boost the number of people who could potentially see your content. Just be careful not to overuse hashtags. A couple of concise and pertinent tags will do the trick.

8. Engage with Comments

Be sure to regularly check and moderate your comments! This is especially important if someone has a complaint that they decide to share on social media. By ignoring negative comments, you could signal to potential customers that you don’t care about their customer experience.

Be calm and professional when responding to negative feedback, but equally, thank people for taking the time to write something positive about your truck as well. This can be a good opportunity to invite them to come back in the future.

9. Use Facebook Ads

As a food truck owner, you might not have much of an advertising budget built into your business plan. This is where Facebook can really make it easy for small businesses to promote themselves. You can spend as much or as little as you would like on ads for your truck, and make sure it is only reaching relevant audiences, like people in your surrounding area.

Even if you can’t advertise on a regular basis, you might want to consider paying for a short run of targeted ads if you have a big event coming up, like a festival or fair in your area.

Facebook as A Food Truck Marketing Tool

We hope these tips have been helpful in getting your Facebook game on point. Social media is a powerful tool for sharing information and connecting with your customers, so don’t miss those opportunities. Now that you have some direction, get out there and start posting!

Don’t have your dream truck yet, or want to upgrade? Contact us for a free quote.