Taken from lightspeedhq.com “Foodie Culture”

If you asked the founders of popular social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, just what kind of impact their creations would have on the world the day before the launch date, I highly doubt any of them would have guessed they were about to give birth to a completely new culture – the foodie culture.

Taking pictures of food and sharing them on social media has quickly turned from a frenzy to an obsession these days with seemingly almost every meal getting documented. This phenomenon has led to the complete alteration of what it means to be a foodie. Originally coined as a term for a connoisseur, the word foodie has now evolved to pretty much include anyone who loves food. And the whole purpose of social media is to share what we love right? So go figure.

Now, all this foodie culture thing isn’t just for visual appeasement. For restaurants, this represents a major business opportunity because after all, the billions of pictures being circulated on the internet each day is really free marketing. Much like how fashion designers and retailers pay fashion influencers to post about their latest products, many high-end restaurants who are ahead of the game are now inviting foodies with a large social media following to dine for free.  As the article claims, foodie influencers “can, and often do ‘make’ restaurants” by turning a completely unknown quantity into one of the most sought after eateries in the city overnight.

From code95.com “Marketing Funnel”

Looking at a simple marketing funnel diagram, such claim does not seem to be a stretch by any means. Essentially, what is really happening is that foodie influencers are propagating the awareness of restaurants by creating content which then pulls their followers into considering the restaurants themselves. This is nothing different than how restaurants conduct marketing themselves, but the key point here is that in order for restaurants to reach the vast audience in the millions that foodie influencers can reach in just one post, a remarkable amount of resources must be devoted to advertising which can be very very expensive.

While the vast majority of restaurants do not have the luxury of being provided with the publicity of well-known foodies, tools such as location tagging on Instagram has made it possible for every foodie out there to be an influencer. In 2015,  over 300 million photos shared on social media were considered to be about food.   Such data presents each and every restaurant an opportunity to gain the free publicity it needs to drive traffic. However, not nearly enough restaurateurs are realizing the importance of just how powerful an influence foodies have on their business.

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