Our food preferences change depending on many factors – age, demographics, even with different seasons! Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re now moving from light summer foods, to more hearty winter staples. With changes in food taste being such a regular occurrence, social media offers the perfect opportunity for brands to not only find new insights, but also promote new products and flavours.
Using Talkwalker’s social media analytics, we looked at the social media performance of 28 leading food brands and 5 major global corporations to discover which brands understand the value of social media best and most effectively engage with customers online.
Here are some of our key findings:
Savoury Snacks For Men, Sweet For Women
Do stereotypes contain a bit of truth? When it comes to food, the cliché says women have a sweet tooth, while men prefer savoury foods. And this does seem to hold true on social.
Broken down by gender, savoury food brands received more attention from men and sweet brands got more success among women.
Our analysis shows that among savoury brands such as Miracoli or Uncle Ben’s, the conversation is largely dominated by men. They account for 54% of mentions, while the ratio is flipped for sweeter brands like Cadbury or Ben & Jerry’s. For them, more than 55% of the buzz is coming from women.
Such insights could be of great help for marketers looking to improve the segmentation for their products and create accurate buyer personas.
Chocolate As The Candy Of Choice In The Southern Hemisphere
Across the world, chocolate brands receive most attention in Southern Hemisphere nations.
Chocolate brands created buzz across countries in the Southern Hemisphere, while Asia discussed Maggi’s product recall.
In South America, Milka dominates the social conversation while Australia shows a strong interest in Cadbury. Across Asia, especially in India, the buzz for Maggi reached very high levels due to a product recall over the summer. In the United States, Skittles was the most-mentioned of the food brands we analyzed.
So for brands looking to make a splash in the Southern hemisphere – social data says chocolate is a good choice!
Emotion Driven Approaches To Twitter
In the wake of their product recall crises over the summer, both Maggi India and Kraft decided on an emotional approach for their Twitter communication. Maggi focused on customer loyalty with its #WeMissYouToo campaign, which saw close to 1,000 mentions per day at its peak at the end of August.
With well-planned social media campaigns, brand can even turn a product crisis into an opportunity to increase customer loyalty.
Driving Facebook Engagement With Visuals
When it comes to audience activity on Facebook, we found Oreo and M&M’s to be the top brands. For both candy brands, images were the content of choice on Facebook.
For M&M's, by posting “snapshots” of their mascots in everyday situations and other product related images they received close to 700,000 interactions – likes, shares or mentions – between June and August.
This is an example of how that visual content can not only drive engagement rates, but also increase a brand’s visibility on Facebook.
Instagram As The Most Underused Social Channel
While Instagram has been around for quite some time, our analysis showed that many food brands are still missing out on the chance to engage with their audience.
Among the brands that are active on Instagram, Oreo and Ben & Jerry’s managed to reach the largest number of people and most effectively engage with users. The ice cream brand for example logged more than 3,400 Instagram mentions over 30 days. Oreo, as the second most prominent food brand on Instagram, saw around 2,400 mentions over the same period.
With competition still so low on Instagram, it’s currently easy for food brands to create an active and engaged community on the image network. With little effort, they can increase their visibility and reach new customers.
Food brands often still underestimate the value of social media in creating and nurturing lasting relationships with customers. Social listening can help them to get valuable customer insights to fuel their overall marketing strategies and to achieve ambitious business goals.
Read our latest case study to learn how you can turn into a social media champion!
