Does a cafe or restaurant actually need TikTok?

The short answer: no. Most venues don't need TikTok, and plenty that are on it are wasting hours they can't spare. Instagram and Facebook are where most Australians actually decide where to eat and drink. TikTok is an amplifier for venues already doing video well, not a starting point. I say that as someone whose client went from zero to hundreds of thousands of TikTok views, so I'm not anti the platform. I'm anti starting there.

This question comes up at nearly every first call, usually as "do we have to be on TikTok now?", asked with the enthusiasm of someone being told they need a second mortgage. So here's the honest framework I use to answer it.

Need and worth it are different questions

Nobody needs TikTok. A venue with a dead Instagram and no video doesn't have a platform problem, it has a content problem, and adding a third platform multiplies the problem rather than fixing it. The real question is whether TikTok is worth it for your venue specifically, and that comes down to two things: who you're trying to reach, and whether you're already producing video consistently.

If you can't yet put out three good videos a week on Instagram, that's the whole job. Get that right first. Everything else in this post assumes you have.

Who TikTok genuinely works for

• Venues chasing under-35s. Younger diners use TikTok like a search engine for where to eat. If you're a city venue, near a university, or building a late-night crowd, that's your audience scrolling.
• Venues with a process worth watching. Open kitchens, bakers at 4am, butchers breaking down a carcass, the pour, the flame, the slice. TikTok loves craft. At The Butcher Club we launched TikTok from zero and the floor staff doing their actual jobs outperformed the celebrity partnerships.
• Venues already making video. This is the big one. If the videos already exist for Instagram, posting them to TikTok costs you five minutes, not a content program. Same footage, posted natively to each platform. That's how every multi-platform venue I run actually works.

Who should skip it, guilt-free

The suburban pub whose crowd is 45-plus locals. The family restaurant that's full on word of mouth and wants to stay that way. The cafe owner doing everything solo who barely has time for one platform. For all of these, Instagram and Facebook cover the people who'll actually walk through the door, and Facebook in particular is quietly still the workhorse for older local audiences, event nights and community groups. Spreading thinner to reach people who were never your customers is how owners burn out on social entirely.

There's a reason my own retainers start on Instagram and Facebook and only add TikTok at the level where there's enough video being produced each month to feed it properly. Platforms should be added the way staff are: when the volume justifies it, not because everyone else is hiring.

If you do add it, do it like this

• Repurpose, don't duplicate the workload. Film once, edit for short-form, post natively to both. No watermarks crossing platforms.
• Let it be rougher. TikTok rewards personality over polish even more than Reels does. The no-face formats all work here too.
• Be patient. TikTok spreads video in waves and regularly resurrects a clip weeks after you posted it. Judge it monthly, not daily, and don't stress about posting times, they matter even less on TikTok.