Food, food and more food. We haven’t gotten bored of writing about food just yet. We looked into our readers’ interests and saw that the TikTok food article was quite popular. So, we brought it back, but this time for instagram food content.
We know for a fact, although not the most popular social media platform there is, Instagram remains brands’ most favourite. Why? Statistically, 80% of Instagram’s 1 billion active users follow at least one business account. And, that’s two reasons why.
Yes, F&B brands are interested and are investing on Instagram advertising, but does it work? Yes, maybe. Sometimes?
Here, at D/A that’s not a good enough answer, and so, let’s take you through our audience-first journey and how we make sure that our brands create the best, highest reaching and most interactive food content.
The Conversation.
For this study, we analysed, 20,762 different food posts with mentions of meals – breakfast, lunch and dinner- in the GCC in both Arabic (Natural and dialects) and English. These posts were all created in 2020 and were able to gain over 37.7 million interactions and over 400 million video views.
Overall, the peak of performance was noticed during the Ramadan period, with other peaks being noticed in the post-Eid Al Fitr period. Surprisingly, the week of Eid itself was the lowest point throughout the year. This is quite the contrary of TikTok that had a peak during the same festive periods. This means that, GCC users posted their Eid food content on TikTok this year, as opposed to Instagram.
Meal Of The Day.
Next, onto the juicy bits.
What meal does the GCC like posting about on Instagram?
Breakfast.
Interact with?
Breakfast.
Watch videos of?
You guessed it, Breakfast.
Number of posts.
On average, there were at least 40 posts created per day with mentions of breakfast. This peaked during the Ramadan period and dropped post-Ramadan; however, the post-Ramadan period continued to be higher than pre-Ramadan.
The use of the word “iftar” is altered in some Arabic dialects including the Khaleeji dialect to the word “Fatoor” which is the same word being used for breakfast in Arabic. Through this inter-changing use of words, the conversation of breakfast continues to be high during the holy month, even if, breakfast was not a regular meal – however, iftar is.
Mentions of lunch continue to be higher than dinner except during the Ramadan period where lunch is not an option.
Post interactions.
Interactions, on the other hand, are a bit tricky.
From the first glance, the pink and later on the green spikes can be noticed. Overall, breakfast prevails; however, lunch and dinner have a say this time.
So, we dug deeper into these specific days, and the results were as follows:
10th Of April, 2020 or the highest peak across all posts this year was a Quarantine birthday dinner by @KarenWazen. Her post gained over 300k engagements.
View this post on Instagram
Looking at the top performing pieces of content, we identified that certain content creators can either make or break a specific day. While some of them might not be specialised in culinary, they remain fans of food and that includes their audiences too.
Video views.
Finally, we looked at video views. And, this one too, is dominated by blue breakfast peaks. This makes complete sense, as more video posts equals more video views.
This led us to a conclusion about instagram food content’s performance this year – when it comes to food content, users interact (likes and comments) more with images rather than videos. While there’s less dinner than breakfast content, and after analysing the top performing dinner pieces, we realised that most of those were actually images.
Actions Taken.
To gain the best out of instagram food content, Focus On Breakfast.
Well, that is if you are focused on gaining the highest reach possible and if you were aiming to work with cooking content creators. But, if you were aiming to gain interactions, the focus can be broader.
You no longer need to fully focus on cooking creators; neither do you need to focus on creating step-by-step tutorial videos. Dinner images can gain you higher interactions and all from a simple image.
About the tool.
D/A has built a custom data warehouse service called Sila that ingests thousands of social media data points a day from across the Arab world. Powered by data science we turn that raw social data into insights, strategy, and actionable marketing. Digital Ape is a creative consultancy agency that uses Sila to turn useful insights into great stories.
To find out more about how to best use an audience first approach to influencers, check out the Art & Science of Influencer Marketing in the G.C.C or get in touch.
