Martech: Martech is Marketing Logo
  • Topics
    Transformation
    Operations
    Data
    Experience
    Performance
    Management
    Special Reports
    All Topics
  • Conference
  • Webinars
  • Intelligence Reports
  • White Papers
  • What is MarTech
    Mission
    Team
    Newsletter
    Search Engine Land
    Third Door Media

Processing...Please wait.

MarTech » Performance Marketing » Deep-dish digital: The most Instagrammed restaurants in America

Deep-dish digital: The most Instagrammed restaurants in America

Columnist Chris Kerns dives into the data from branded hashtags across the US to bring marketers insight into what social data reveals about brands and consumers.

Chris Kerns on May 9, 2016 at 4:04 pm

ss-food-instagram-sandwich

When setting out to plan social media campaigns for big brands, there is a long list of factors to juggle. Marketers need to manage a budget, find the right mix of organic and paid, put out fires on a weekly basis and handle a huge influx of customer comments. But one of the biggest question marks — and opportunities — for many American brands is how to translate a national campaign to the diverse makeup of the United States.

How can you speak with one voice to such a diverse set of geographies and demographic groups? How can you manage your budget with an understanding of where you’re already overperforming vs. underperforming?

One of the best ways to do this is with market research, and the great news is that there are new — and underused — methods for providing marketers with a real-time look at the market landscape. In the past, market research has only been done with surveys and focus groups, giving you results six months later (if you’re lucky) to give you insights around consumers and their attitudes.

But today we’ll look at social media and how this data source can help provide answers to some questions with a few quick searches.

To demonstrate the power of social data, we looked at branded hashtags across the country to see what we could learn about brands and consumers. We chose restaurants as a good example to highlight regional differences and see what social mentions can tell us — within a few hours of research, not a few months.

The data

Many Instagram posts, like other social content, include geolocation embedded in the data. We took a look at Instagram posts with geolocation turned on that also included a mention of a restaurant from a list of 96 fast food and casual restaurant brands in the United States.

We collected data from June 2015 through mid-January 2016, ending up with around 500,000 posts with a combination of geolocation information and restaurant hashtags.

The findings: Starbucks rules the US

In aggregate, the most Instagrammed brands across the country were:

Instagram_brands

Starbucks

As most caffeine-addicts could have told you, Starbucks is the 800-pound gorilla of social restaurants. Starbucks hashtags are used over six times more than the next biggest chain, #InnOut, and registered top marks in every state except for Vermont.

Starbucks has a rare combination of physical reach across the US and a brand promise that many Americans look to associate themselves with.

Knowing that Starbucks wins the day, we needed to exclude the outlier to understand patterns in regional differences across the US. Once Starbucks was placed to the side, a different picture of the United States emerged.

The United States goes out to dinner

The first pattern we noticed was that brand popularity doesn’t correlate 1:1 with the number of physical locations, with smaller brands enjoying a good showing in many states. We also see that Dunkin’ Donuts dominates the East Coast; Cracker Barrel dominates in many states in the middle of the country; and In-N-Out has a huge share of voice in many West Coast states.

Instagram_Map

Shake Shack and In-N-Out

In-N-Out has a long history of word-of-mouth in California since its founding back in the 1940s, but there’s evidence of a potential new favorite brand in the near future. In-N-Out managed to win California, Arizona and Utah, but Shake Shack — the fast-growing NYC burger chain — is catching up quickly, with a big acceleration in social mentions.

Smaller brands

We saw patterns in several states where local brands — like Braum’s in Oklahoma and Graeter’s Ice Cream in Ohio — are the top-used hashtags in the local market. Just like Starbucks, these local brands define users’ personalities. Many people in the area will have decades of associations with the local brands, and visitors love to show off any local flavor they find while traveling.

Rhode Island & Sonic

The small state of Rhode Island showed an interesting pattern for a new entry into the local marketplace. By looking at month-over-month totals for restaurant brands in the state, we can see a new brand appearing in October and enjoying a quick social rise: Sonic.

Instagram_RI

Sonic began operations in Rhode Island in October of 2015 and was frequently mentioned enough to bump Ben & Jerry’s out of the second-place spot for Instagram mentions by January of 2016. It’s a good reminder that even with decades of history, a social crowd’s attention can quickly shift to new topics and brands.

Take-home learnings for marketers

There’s a full-meal deal going on in social data, and marketers should look to use as much as possible to tell the story for their success. When you combine hashtags or mentions with other dimensions of data — like geolocation — you can find patterns and insights that could otherwise take months of costly market research to uncover.

Here are some points to consider as you’re jumping in to understand your brand’s overall performance in a regional world:

  1. Make the most of your budget: Social media can help identify local patterns to make sure you have a true understanding of where your brand is taking hold and where you’re slipping. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to plan your strategy with better data and insights, which should make any marketer’s mouth water.
  2. Know the local language: A data-driven approach can not only help you understand local attitudes, but it also can give your creative team direction on regional keywords, imagery and tone/voice. It’s important to speak with one brand voice and to know the ins and outs of each audience that will hopefully be listening.
  3. Competitive edge: Data from social media gives your brand an edge — not only understanding who’s talking about you vs. your competition, but getting that information in real time. By leveraging the right data sources, you can ensure that your marketing team is learning about your audience each and every day.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


New on MarTech

    Marketing operations talent is suffering burnout and turnover

    Antitrust bill could force Google, Facebook and Amazon to shutter parts of their ad businesses

    Unveiling our first MarTech Intelligence Report on email marketing platforms

    How product analytics can unite marketing and product teams to boost customer lifetime value

    Create a B2B GTM strategy that buyers, execs and revenue teams love

About The Author

Chris Kerns
Chris Kerns has spent more than a decade defining digital strategy and sits at the forefront of extracting insights from digital data. He is the VP of Research & Insights at Spredfast, a social software platform that empowers enterprise organizations to connect with consumers in an increasingly social world. His research has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, USA Today and the The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He is also the author of Trendology, the first book to dive into the advantage brands can build using a data-driven approach to real-time marketing.

Related Topics

Performance Marketing

Get the daily newsletter digital marketers rely on.

Processing...Please wait.

See terms.

ATTEND OUR EVENTS

June 7, 2022: Master Classes

September 28-29, 2022: Fall

Start Discovering Now: Spring

Learn More About Our MarTech Events

June 14-15, 2022: SMX Advanced (virtual)

November 14-15, 2022: SMX Next (virtual)

March 8-9, 2022: Master Classes (virtual)

Learn More About Our SMX Events

Webinars

Take a Crawl, Walk, Run Approach to Multi-Channel ABM

Content Comes First: Transform Your Operations With DAM

Dominate Your Competition with Google Auction Insights and Search Intelligence

See More Webinars

Intelligence Reports

Enterprise SEO Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

Enterprise Identity Resolution Platforms

Email Marketing Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

Enterprise Sales Enablement Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

Enterprise Digital Experience Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

Enterprise Call Analytics Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide

See More Intelligence Reports

White Papers

Reputation Management For Healthcare Organizations

Unlock the App Marketing Potential of QR Codes

Realising the power of virtual events for demand generation

The Progressive Marketer’s Ultimate Events Strategy 2022 Worksheet

CMO Guide: How to Plan Smart and Pivot Fast

See More Whitepapers

Receive daily marketing news & analysis.

Processing...Please wait.

Topics

  • Transformation
  • Operations
  • Data
  • Experience
  • Performance
  • Management
  • All Topics
  • Home

Our Events

  • MarTech
  • Search Marketing Expo - SMX

About

  • What is MarTech
  • Contact
  • Privacy
  • Marketing Opportunities
  • Staff

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Newsletters
  • RSS

© 2022 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.