Following The Food Trucks on Social Media
This article is the second of three that I shall be writing about my work for the Food Standards Agency, looking at visual social media research methods.
Here, I shall be discussing my research looking at food trends — namely food trucks — as manifested across Pinterest and Instagram. This comparison demonstrates that when researching social media, it’s important to be aware of the differences between platforms, not just in terms of their affordances (what they enable users to do), but also in terms of the variations in image cultures, and what this entails.
The purpose of this research was to understand how different audiences, and different conversations about food, could be identified across social media platforms. This helps the FSA to tailor food safety messages to these specific contexts and viewers. This current research built upon the FSA’s previous work with the Nationwide Caterers’ Association, in which mobile caterers were encouraged to share an image of their Food Hygiene Rating sticker on social media. Such forms of observation and engagement are important components of the FSA’s objective to use social media to foster dialogue with both consumers and food vendors.
For this study, I downloaded 300 images from each platform that had been tagged ‘food truck’. Pinterest images were also gathered from boards labelled food truck, which as I’ll describe below, makes quite a difference to the findings. I then performed a content analysis on all 600 images, considering: is the image commercial in origin; is it a photograph or some other type of image; and does it depict a truck, food, or people? These questions helped me to analyse the kinds of conversations and audiences that could be identified in relation to the images.
Pinterest and Instagram might seem quite similar, as both are image-based, and enable users to search for visual materials on a given topic. Yet whilst looking at food trucks, I noticed some interesting differences in the kinds of images being shared. I’ll outline these findings by answering my three main research questions:
1. What do images tagged ‘food truck’ depict? Do they show the food available, or focus on something else? Can we see what food truck customers are eating?
As the graphs below show, the Pinterest images predominately featured a truck, whereas Instagram images more frequently featured food. This reflects the different ways in which the data was posted to the platform, and subsequently gathered for this case study. Instagram enables multiple hashtags to be applied to a single image, so an image can be tagged ‘food truck’ as well as many other things. Pinterest pins can also have multiple tags, but the images collected here were from food truck themed boards, meaning that the images had gone through an additional layer of filtering: hence the more literal depiction of food trucks, rather than things associated with food trucks, such as food. This variation is also due to the different commercial sectors present on each platform, as I explore below.
2. Who is sharing images tagged ‘food truck’? Are they consumers, or the food truck vendors themselves?
The majority of images on both sites were commercial in origin, in that they either linked to a commercial website (on Pinterest) or had been posted by a business (on Instagram). This commercial orientation was similar across both platforms:
However, this is not to say that the commercial origin was the same for both platforms, as Instagram featured food truck businesses posting about menus, opening times and offers (and therefore communicating with food truck customers). In contrast, Pinterest featured a number of companies who specialised in food truck sales, branding and renovation (and therefore communicating with food truck vendors).
3. What are the differences and similarities between the two platforms, and how can the FSA tailor its own message on mobile food vendors to suit these specific social media audiences?
In terms of content, photographs dominate both sites, yet infographics appear only on Pinterest and videos only on Instagram. This suggests a need for food truck specific content designed for each platform: an infographic on food safety directed at vendors on Pinterest, and a video directed at potential consumers on Instagram. Additionally, the Agency might wish to make a food truck specific board on Pinterest, as out of 1300 boards on food trucks, only two were on the theme of food safety.
By ascertaining the various conversations being had about food trucks — about their purchase as vendors, and about their use as customers — this case study has demonstrated how Pinterest and Instagram can be used together to explore different aspects of a particular food trend. Social media research, therefore, cannot afford to focus on just one platform, but instead needs to look at a range of sources in order to understand the multiple interests that are invested in any given topic.
Image: ‘New York Food Truck’ by Sacha Fernandez: http://bit.ly/2lgsmWo. Flickr Creative Commons.
Originally published at socialmediaphotographies.wordpress.com on February 24, 2017.
