Guide · Instagram
A booking link in your restaurant's Instagram bio that you can measure
Someone sees your Sunday roast in their feed, taps through to your profile and wants a table. What happens in the next ten seconds — a booking page, a link to your homepage, or nothing at all — is decided by one line in your bio.
Published
Two things called “booking on Instagram”
The first is a link you add to your own profile. Instagram's help centre has a page on adding a website to your profile, and its summary says you can add up to five. You choose where each one goes, and you can change it any day. It is yours.
The second is an action button — the Book or Reserve kind — which Instagram offers business profiles as a feature of its own, with its own help page. Whether you can have one, and who the booking goes through, is between you, Instagram and whichever booking provider works with it. Slotora is not one of those providers: nothing arrives from Instagram into Slotora by itself. Everything in this guide is about the first kind.
Why the bio link should go straight to the booking page
- Every extra tap loses people. A link to your homepage, then a menu, then a Book button, is three chances to give up on a phone.
- A link to a page you control does not depend on a partnership between two other companies, and does not change when they do.
- The booking made through it is yours: no marketplace in the middle, no fee per guest.
- You can point it at something else for a week — a tasting evening, Mother's Day — and back again, without asking anyone.
Tag it, so you know it worked
A link with nothing on the end tells you nothing. Add one word to it — ?src=instagramon the end of your booking page's address — and every table booked through that link is counted under that word in your reports, beside the bookings from your QR card, your website and wherever else you put the link.
The word is yours to choose. If you want to tell the bio apart from a link you share in a story, give them different words: ?src=instagram for the bio, ?src=story for the story. One lower-case word each, no spaces.
Five minutes, start to finish
- 1
Copy your booking page's address
The page where a guest chooses the party size, the day, a room if you have more than one, and a time that is really free.
- 2
Add the word
Put ?src=instagram on the end. Open the result on your own phone to make sure it still lands on your booking page.
- 3
Put it in the profile
Follow the steps on Instagram's help page linked below; menus there move from time to time, so we do not copy them here. If you have several links, put the booking one first.
- 4
Look at the reports in a month
Bookings by source show what the bio brought in, next to the QR card and the website. If Instagram is quiet, you have learnt something too.
What the count includes, and what it cannot
The reports count online table bookings by the word on the link the guest used. Two honest limits. A guest who sees you on Instagram and then rings is a phone booking, with no word attached. And a booking for one of your events, made after arriving through the tagged link, is not counted by source; the table bookings are.
Instagram links: short answers
Can Slotora give me the Book button on my Instagram profile?
No. That button is Instagram's own feature, and Slotora does not supply it. Your own link in the bio works for every profile and needs nobody's approval.
Will the guest have to sign up for anything?
No. They book on your page with no account, and get a link to cancel or change their booking afterwards.
Can I use the same trick for Facebook or a newsletter?
Yes: the link takes any one-word source. Use a different word for each place, so the reports keep them apart.
Sources
The booking link on your Google profile · Your online booking page · The reports · All guides