How to win social media shares and influence the fast-food market

New research from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia examines a common assumption in social media marketing: For fast-food brands, social media posts that signal expertise and competence are shared more often than those focused on warmth and friendliness. 

The study, published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Hospitality Management, found that analytical language and blue-green visual cues encouraged significantly more sharing on Facebook than emotionally expressive captions and warm-coloured imagery. 

First author and doctoral candidate Uchitha Wijesinghe, from the university’s School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, comments: “In the highly competitive fast-food industry, outlets and delivery services must jostle for consumers’ attention and engagement on social media platforms to keep their brands prominent and break through to potential customers. 

“For marketers, the most valued engagement is content sharing, which is equivalent to offline word-of-mouth recommendations, on social media platforms such as Facebook.” 

Two studies conducted on social media posts 

The researchers conducted two studies: the first on Facebook posts from quick-service restaurants and the second on Facebook posts from mobile app-based food delivery services. 

Each study analysed text and images separately to test how cues of warmth, denoted by warm colours such as yellow and red, and competence, denoted by blue and green, affected social media engagement. 

The researchers classified ‘warmth’ as emotionally expressive language and ‘competence’ as language reflecting thinking, reasoning, explanation, causation and analytical processing. 

Food posts containing stronger competence cues were found to be more likely to be shared than posts dominated by emotional language. In fact, warm colours and emotional captions had a negative effect on sharing. 

“Our finding that competence-based cues consistently led to stronger engagement through content sharing indicates people look for evidence of expertise and credibility, even in highly visual and competitive social environments, before they pass a post on to friends,” Wijesinghe notes. 

The results suggest that food cues alone might not be sufficient to generate shares. 

“The effectiveness of food-related content appears to depend on whether the surrounding message contains visual and text cues that support stronger evaluation of the post,” Wijesinghe says. 

“When developing text-based content, managers could complement their food-related words with some that reflect thinking, reasoning or explanation. 

“Similarly, food imagery may be strengthened when food-related visual content appears alongside a greater presence of blue and green tones.” 

Read more about the study, titled ‘Competence cues drive engagement with food posts on Facebook: Convergent multimodal evidence from the field’, here.