How to use Instagram for Food and Wine
Photos and video are very important in wine and food marketing. There’re over 1 Billion users on Instagram, with 95 Millions post shared every day by 500 Million users; 400 Millions of them use also the Instagram Stories and over 120 Millions are Millennials. Many news are introduced since it creation, like music in Stories and IG TV.
Shortly, Instagram is the new growing up social, while Facebook is the decreasing one. Hence, if you look at Food and Wine best Instagram feeds it’s a good idea to know how use it. Shortly:
- 200 million Instagram users visit at least one business profile every day
Instagram Ads reach almost 900 million users - 63% of user log in the app at least once a day
Here, there’re 5 hints to use Instagram for Food and Wine market sector.
1 – Design your brand
Your Instagram’s post are your face, your voice and your brand. As you take care of your wine shop, restaurant or vinery, so you have to take care of your feed; it has to be recognizable at the first sight, for colors, filters or background style.
You have to establish a key idea for your brand to make you unique in the landscape of your competitors.
2 – Quality and Scenography
Photos must be high quality. Yes, your followers look at your pics with their smartphone, but I’m not speaking of technical quality, but artistical one: your photos must look nice, good, and broadcasts the care you put in your business. If you’ve a restaurant, place your dishes in a well done table, with background shade matching the food’s color. In a wine shop, dispose your bottle for wine type order, all sparking wine for example, or show yourself while you’re pouring a bottle. Show your grapes during the harvest with people amongst the rows; the barrels or barriques are a good subject, but remember to use light or filter. And, ever, show your logo or a bottle of your wine.
3 – Build the Stories
Stories are the funniest news from Instagram, where you can build a story with one or many photos, or record a 15-seconds video. These are useful to tell something about your brand, for example when you cook a dish, open your shop or restaurant, pour your current vintage wine in the glass. A follower can see your Stories only if they click on them, so you can post how much pics and videos you want, without to be boring. There’re some nice effect, filter, stickers, to make your post artistic, but the best strategy is to think what you want to communicate: sunset on vineyard, for example, or the first customer of the night: only your fantasy is the limit. Stories live 24 hours then Instagram delete them, but they remain in your feed if you click the little white hearth bottom right and put them ‘in evidence’. It’s a great way to engage your followers.
4 – Hashtag and Storytelling
Hashtags are a delicate topic: how many hashtags is right? 5? 10? And, moreover, how can I find the more searched ones, so to link my posts to a popular word? Well, my trick is don’t use more than 5 hashtags, to not make your post too heavy and not serious. For Food&Wine on Instagram more used hashtags are #foodporn with 243 Millions post, #winelover has 10.7 Millions and #wineporn with over 1.8M posts; of course, also #wine and #winelover are very good hashtags with some millions of posts. Look at the more followed IGers (people that post on Instagram) in your topic and study what they add in their posts, but the more important thing is you have to tell a story with your hashtag. Harvest, Dinner, Winebar, Cake, there are really many of them. Think what you want to tell, find three to five special words for your tale and use them as hashtags.
5 – People in the center
People are important, don’t forget to shot a pic with people, waiters in your restaurant, friends in a harvest day, people at a taste event in your wine shop, all of them are interesting subject to depict in your post. Ask them if they have no problem to post your photo on Instagram, then choose people smiling, eating a colored dish, drinking your wine, shotting a selfie.
