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...only a few years too late...
You can save time on the narrative below and go here: https://www.instagram.com/regularjoesguide
There was a time when the RJG was ahead of the curve, especially when one considers that we were the single most popular restaurant blog in Dallas-Fort Worth according to Urbanspoon. Yea, Urbanspoon. Remember them? They were a blog friendly site that helped promote local restaurants via those blogs. We ended up designing this blog around that site, which took me some years to unwind. In 2015, an Indian firm called Zomato bought the site and subsequently destroyed it because they didn't take the time to understand why it was popular. They took away crowd sourcing, and everyone eventually moved to Google Reviews and Yelp. Both platforms are decidedly anti-blog. We've added reviews to Google and TripAdvisor, but it hasn't lead to much activity here. Why do I prefer the blog platform over the others? Because I can control the content and keep posts relevant. I love history and these other platforms are all "about the now". You write a review, and someone might scan over it, and that's it. Lost forever after that. We have a Facebook account too, with similar poor results.
Back to Urbanspoon. Apparently there was a lot of dirty business going on in some cities with pay to play blogs who had achieved similar status to ours in certain cities. But that never happened in DFW. All of us played fair and by the rules. The RJG ended up in first place based on pure attrition - we just had more entries, but we weren't the best writers. And we still aren't great writers, but that was never the point. It was about exposure of the restaurant itself. With that in mind, our Instagram posts will only feature independent and small chains. And ones we like and recommend. No need to accentuate negative experiences. Also no need to photo In-N-Out Burger or Del Taco. Yes, we love those places too, but we can keep our running tally here in the blog. That hopefully gets a few more viewers. We have a few loyal readers, but there was a time when each post drew four figures. Now it's a fraction of that. Mainly because we haven't built up much of a local following. Perhaps this will get us back on the map.
The thing about Instagram is the platform is designed solely for mobile phones and photographs. The latter is something we've traditionally been very poor at executing. It's a matter of discipline, but as the RJG is getting more focus now that I have some free time, I will make that effort. Rude Dante and Mr. Music are welcome to join in on the fun.
We've had success with Instagram with my music hobby. So we'll see how we do with restaurants.
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