Can AI write your restaurant's social media? An honest guide

Yes, AI can write most of your restaurant's social media, provided a person checks every post before it goes out. AI social media tools for restaurants are good at first drafts, new angles on the same Sunday roast and keeping a schedule ticking over. Where they fall down is facts they weren't given: dates, prices, allergens, who's playing on Saturday. Treat every caption as a draft.

#What is AI good at for restaurant social media?

Speed with words. Give one of these tools the facts ("Quiz night, Thursday 8pm, £50 jackpot, teams of up to six") and you'll have a usable first draft in seconds, which you then edit. That's a far easier job than staring at an empty caption box at 4pm while the lunch clear-down is still going on around you.

They're also good at variety. Promote the same Sunday lunch every week and you'll run out of ways to say it by about week three (everyone does). Ask an AI tool for ten angles and it'll happily give you the crackling, the Yorkshires, the table by the fire, the dog that's welcome in the snug, and booking before the 1pm rush.

And they help you keep to a schedule, which is usually the first thing to slip when you're busy. Hand one a list of what's coming up over the next month and it can draft the lot in a single sitting, so posting stops depending on whether somebody remembers on the day. Our 2027 hospitality marketing calendar is a decent list of dates to feed it.

#Where do AI tools go wrong with venue posts?

The big one is made-up detail. Language models write whatever sounds likely, so if you haven't told one the price of steak night it may invent one that sounds about right. Google says as much in its own help pages: LLM experiences, Gemini included, "can hallucinate and present inaccurate information as factual". For a pub or restaurant that looks like quiz night announced for the wrong day, a two-for-one you never agreed to, or a kick-off time an hour out.

Then there's the phrasing. Left alone, AI reaches for the same small pile of words every feed seems to share now: mouth-watering, indulge, cosy vibes, "the perfect spot for". Phrases like that make your posts read like everybody else's, and the regulars notice when you stop sounding like you. It gets worse if the place down the road uses the same tool with the same lazy prompt, because then your captions and theirs are more or less interchangeable.

#How do you keep AI captions on-brand?

Write your rules down, give the tool real examples and hand it the facts every single time, then have a person read what comes back.

A brand rules sheet that works fits on one page. Mine would cover:

• How you talk, in a couple of plain words ("warm and a bit dry"), and whether posts say "we" or use the venue's name
• A list of banned words you'd never say out loud (indulge, mouth-watering, delectable, vibes, treat yourself)
• A maximum caption length, for example 60 words on Instagram
• Your hashtag style, meaning how many and which ones, ideally local and specific
• An emoji rule (none, one per post, or as many as you like) that you stick to
• The facts it must never guess, such as prices, dates, times, offers, allergens and fixtures
• Five past posts you were proud of, pasted in as examples

Examples do a lot of the work. "Friendly and fun" means something different to everyone who reads it, whereas five real captions show the tool what you mean straight away. If you haven't pinned your voice down yet, our guide to finding your venue's brand voice walks through it.

Then put the facts in the prompt. "Write a post for quiz night" gets you an invented jackpot. "Quiz night, Thursday 8pm, £50 jackpot, teams of up to six, free entry, kitchen open till 9" gets you a caption you can check in seconds. There's more on what makes a caption worth acting on in our piece on Instagram captions for pubs and restaurants.

#Why should a person approve every post?

Because you're the one answerable for it. The Advertising Standards Authority says the CAP and BCAP Codes "do not contain AI-specific rules" and that marketers should make sure their use of AI doesn't create a problem under the existing ones. Put plainly, the normal rules on misleading marketing apply to an AI-written post the same way they apply to one you typed yourself. (That's general information, not legal advice.)

There's also everything a tool can't know about this week. The chef's off sick and the tasting menu's been pulled, or something's happened locally and a jokey post would land badly. An approval step is the moment someone who knows what's going on gets the last look.

It doesn't have to be a daily chore. I'd batch it: one sitting a week, coffee in hand, going through everything due in the next seven days and fixing anything that's off.

That's the way we built Venuesmith: every AI draft is checked against your brand rules (tone, banned words, caption length, hashtag style) by a separate reviewer and rewritten if it drifts, and nothing publishes until you approve it, either post by post or a whole plan in one go.

#How do you fact-check an AI caption before it goes out?

Read it against your records, never against your memory. Have the menu, the till prices, the events diary and the fixture list open while you approve, and check each claim in the caption against one of them.

Be strictest with allergen and dietary wording. If a caption says a dish is vegan or gluten free, that has to match what your kitchen does every time it makes it, and the Food Standards Agency's allergen guidance for food businesses is the place to check how allergen information should be handled. I wouldn't let an AI tool add a dietary claim that wasn't in the facts you gave it.

For sport, check the fixture on the competition's own site the day before it posts, in case the date or kick-off has moved since you planned the week.

#Should you use AI-generated food photos?

I wouldn't. A picture of a burger your kitchen has never made is a promise you can't keep when the real one lands on the table. The ASA has said that an AI image showing a cosmetic product's effect that doesn't reflect real-world results is "likely to be materially misleading", and the same logic sits pretty comfortably on a plate of food.

There's a practical catch too. Meta adds an "AI info" label to images on Facebook and Instagram when it detects industry-standard signals that they were made with AI, according to its labelling policy. Most venues would sooner their food photos didn't carry one.

So use AI for the words and the planning, and your phone for the pictures. Our guide to food photography on your phone covers light, angles and the bits people get wrong.

#Which jobs should stay with a person?

Anything that's a conversation. Replies to reviews, complaints in the comments, a DM from someone asking whether the risotto is safe with a nut allergy: those are real guests, and they deserve an answer from someone who's read what they wrote. AI can give you a draft to start from (so can our review reply templates), but the reply should go out under your eye.

The same goes for posts that name a member of staff, mention a customer, or touch on anything sensitive locally. Let the tool draft the Tuesday quiz and the new autumn menu, and keep the judgement calls for yourself.