AskFoodie.AIFollowers & alerts
Diners follow you, you post updates, and they hear about it — on their terms, without ever being spammed.
A follower is a diner who has asked to hear from you. Building that list is the quiet half of what AskFoodie does: the punch-card brings people back, and followers give you a way to tell them something between visits.
How someone becomes a follower
They tap Follow — on your public page, on a deal card, in the Foodie Passport partner list, or on the screen they see after tapping your NFC tag at the counter. Staff asking "follow us for what's on" at the till is the single best source; it takes one tap and no app.
Diners who visit but never tap Follow still see your updates on their home feed. They just don't get email or notifications until they ask.
What a follower chooses
Each follower picks their own level, per restaurant:
| Their choice | What they get |
|---|---|
| Weekly email | One Thursday email covering every place they follow. |
| Weekly email + alerts | The same email, plus notifications on their phone. |
| Unfollow | Nothing. Their punch card and rewards are untouched. |
They also choose when they're willing to be interrupted — 10am, 4pm, both, or neither — once, for everything they follow.
Deciding when to send an alert
Posting and alerting are two different things, and the difference decides how often you press Notify.
| Their feed | An alert | |
|---|---|---|
| Gets | your latest two updates, for as long as they run | only the ones you tap Notify on |
| Needs from them | just a follow | alerts turned on for you, and a window they kept |
| How often | as often as you post | at most once a day, two in any 7 days |
Most of what you post should never send an alert, and that's the intended ratio. Post four times a week and you're allowed to alert on three — you probably shouldn't. One is usually the right answer. The rest still reach your followers in the feed, where anyone who opens the app will see them.
Worth knowing:
- The weekly cap is rolling. Alert on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and you have nothing until the following Friday. Monday doesn't reset it.
- The feed shows your latest two. Posting five times in a day doesn't get you five slots — it buries your own morning post. Space them out.
- Undated updates drop out of feeds after 30 days. They stay on your page.
- Some updates can't be alerted on at all, whatever your slots say. When Notify won't let you lists every reason.
Think of the feed as where the volume lives, and the alert as the rare tap on the shoulder — the Tuesday you have forty oysters to sell before close.
Sending an alert
On any live update, tap Notify. That marks it as worth interrupting someone for.
It does not send immediately, and that's deliberate. It goes out at each follower's next update window — 10am or 4pm, their local time — bundled with anything else they're waiting on. So a diner who follows fifteen places gets one notification, not fifteen.
Two limits, and they exist to protect you as much as the diner:
- One alert per day.
- Two alerts in any 7 days — rolling, so the older one frees up on its own seven days after you sent it.
A phone that buzzes too often gets notifications switched off, and there is no second chance to ask — once a diner turns them off, no restaurant can reach them again. Scarcity is what keeps the channel worth having.
When Notify won't let you
Every refusal names a reason:
- "You've already sent an alert today" — one a day. Try tomorrow.
- "Two alerts a week is the limit" — the older one frees up in a few days.
- "Nobody following you has alerts turned on yet" — nothing is spent; you can send once someone opts in.
- "This post has been up more than 30 days" — it has dropped out of diners' feeds, so the alert would open a page that no longer lists it. Give it dates, or post it fresh.
- Win-back updates can't be alerted — they're aimed at lapsed diners only, and a notification would reach your regulars too.
What you can see about your followers
A count, on your dashboard: "N following · M with alerts on".
Not names, not email addresses, not who came in last. That's a deliberate promise to diners — they opted in through AskFoodie, not to a mailing list — and it's why they say yes as readily as they do. Any team member can see the count; it's the number staff are growing at the counter.
Good to know
- You never send email yourself. All of it rides one weekly digest from AskFoodie, Thursday morning in the diner's own timezone, with at most two updates from each of up to six restaurants. One sender means one unsubscribe, which is why a diner will keep it.
- A quiet week sends nothing. No updates, no email, no notification. The channel stays worth opening.
- Alerts only go out while you're open. If your kitchen is closed at 4pm on a Sunday, that bundle skips you.
- Unfollowing never touches loyalty. A diner who stops hearing from you keeps every punch and every reward they earned. That was your restaurant's promise, not the newsletter's.