A Story lasts a day. A Maps review is still working next year.

Three formats, three different jobs

They are not interchangeable, and picking by price is how venues end up disappointed.

• A Story reaches people who already follow that creator, once, for a day. It is the cheapest thing you can offer and it is good at filling a quiet service this week.
• A Reel or TikTok reaches people who were not following anybody. It is the one that turns up when somebody searches, and it keeps turning up.
• A Maps review with photographs sits on the listing people read while deciding between you and two others. It is the only one still working a year later.

How people actually look for somewhere to eat now

A large share of the people worth reaching do not open a search engine. They type the kind of place they want into TikTok or Instagram and scroll until something looks right. That is a search, and the results are videos.

This is the mechanism behind the collab that keeps paying. A Reel is not just reach on the day it goes up. It is an entry in a search index that somebody will scroll past three months from now while deciding where to go tonight.

A rating is a number. A review is words, and words are searchable.

Five stars and nothing else tells the reader almost nothing and gives Google almost nothing. The text is the part that works. Google does not publish how it ranks a business, so nobody can promise you a position, but the mechanism underneath is not mysterious: somebody types a phrase, and listings whose reviews contain that phrase are more likely to come back.

Which means the words in a review are doing a job. "Lovely place, great service" describes every venue on the island. "The sourdough pizza and the natural wine list, five minutes from Batu Bolong" describes exactly one, and it matches what somebody actually typed.

Ask for the dish by name

This is the single most useful thing to put in a brief, and almost nobody does it. If your menu has a signature dish, the review that names it becomes the answer to a search for that dish.

The same is true of the things people search that are not on your menu at all: the neighbourhood, the occasion, what makes you different. Somebody searching for a sunset spot in Seminyak, a quiet place to work in Canggu, or a restaurant that takes a large group is describing a need rather than a cuisine.

• The dish or treatment by its actual name, not "the food".
• The area, in the words locals use for it.
• The occasion it suited: a work morning, a birthday, a long lunch.
• One specific detail. The staff member who helped, the table by the window, how long the wait was.

Photographs do two jobs at once

A review with the reviewer's own photographs is more useful to the next reader and more visible on the listing. Maps surfaces images prominently, and a grid of real photographs from real visits reads very differently from three professional shots uploaded by the venue.

Ask for the plate as it arrived rather than styled, the room at the hour people actually come, and the exterior as somebody arriving would see it. That last one is the shot most listings are missing, and it is the one that stops people walking past.

Where the line is

A review has to be the creator's own, and it has to be true. Dictating the sentences produces something that reads as dictated, and platforms are better at spotting that than most people assume. Asking somebody to mention the dish they actually ate is a brief. Writing the review for them is not.

The practical version: say what you would like mentioned, then leave the writing alone.

Run them together rather than choosing

The pattern that works is not picking a favourite. Stories fill the slots that were not selling. Reels build the searchable library. Reviews build the authority that makes both of them convert.

A venue that runs only Stories has a busy week and nothing to show for it. A venue that runs only Reels has a library and empty Tuesdays.