If you’re in the business of selling food, there’s nothing more powerful than mouth-watering visual content. Below are five food brands that are using graphics to grow social media engagement in a stellar away.

1. REESE’S Peanut Butter Cups (@ReesesPBCups)

One of REESE’S social media strengths is that they bring their personality in every post.

Here, they do this by letting their audience know that you don’t have to be a culinary connoisseur to make this Peanut Butter Temptations recipe. By placing the skill level text over each recipe graphic, and playfully referring to beginner level recipes as “Newbie”, they make their content more approachable for their audience. Humor, enthusiasm, and playfulness are contagious! And it shows here.

Let’s not forget about the strategic logo placement and the visually branded orange used on top of the image, too. This ensures that everyone who views this image (whether directly on REESE’S Twitter profile or from a retweet) will know exactly where it came from without having to click-through to the full recipe.

Humor, enthusiasm, and playfulness are contagious!

With 434 retweets and 1,800 likes on this post, this a social media marketing success that any food brand would be wise to replicate.

2. Becel Canada (@BecelCA)

The victory in this Lemon Crinkle Cookie recipe post is in its subtlety.

Here, the cookies take center stage, and let’s be honest – that’s what viewers want to see! By placing the branded butter tub in the background (just in focus enough to be identifiable) the branding is less overt.

For followers or social media users who see this post, it now feels more like an organic straight-from-the-kitchen cell phone snap, as opposed to the result of a branded product photo shoot. A great bonus for Becel! Now their post registers as authentic in the minds of viewers, in a world where many posts come across as “spammy”.

Remember, social media shouldn’t be all about you!

What makes this post even better? Becel Canada didn’t create it! A food blogger by the name of Jennifer (@momvstheboys on Twitter) did. Becel Canada simply retweeted the post! A fantastic way to reach their audience organically.

Remember, social media shouldn’t be all about you! Instead of sharing tweets that come across as “Look! We are great.” time after time, retweeting posts from others that show support for your product tells your followers “This person likes our product, and we appreciate that” instead. Much more credible!

3. Quaker Oats (@Quaker)

Sometimes, the no-nonsense, straightforward approach works. This post by Quaker is a testament to that.

Here, the branding is minimal: a simple logo in the top left hand corner. Quaker consistently uses this template when sharing photos of recipes, and that cohesion makes their Twitter feed visibly pleasing when visitors scroll through their tweets.

By sticking to what you do best, and doing it often, followers begin to trust your brand. Your profile, website, or blog becomes a resource they know they can depend on.

On Quaker’s profile, there are no unexpected surprises. Just quality images with food at the forefront, and it works! It makes finding an appetizing recipe easy for their audience, while still working in their favor for brand recognition and reach.

By sticking to what you do best, and doing it often, followers begin to trust your brand. Your profile, website, or blog becomes a resource they know they can depend on.

With 187,000 Twitter followers, Quaker is a prime example of a trusted brand doing visual content correctly.

4. Kahlua (@KahluaUS)

People on the internet consume content faster than ever before. People form a first impression online in a mere 50 milliseconds. That’s not a lot of time to convince someone to share or engage with your content.

The average click-through rate on Twitter is 1.64 per cent. If you have 5,000 followers, that means on average 80 people will click the links you share. And the more followers you have, the lower your click through rate is.

With this post, Kahlua understood that. They could have easily only posted the image, directly viewers to click on a link to the recipe…but they didn’t. Instead, they took the time to place the recipe on the graphic itself. Why?

Putting an extra step in between viewers and the purpose of your content only hurts you. The purpose of this post for Kahlua was to entice their audience to want to buy their product to make this particular drink. But if the viewer has to click-through to see the recipe in order to decide if this is a drink they would like, you’ve now put a hurdle in their way.

The average click-through rate on Twitter is 1.64 per cent. If you have 5,000 followers, that means on average 80 people will click the links you share. And the more followers you have, the lower your click-through rate is.

So what does it all mean? Sometimes, it’s less effective to ask people to click a link. And this was one of those cases.

By putting the recipe on the image, Kahlua enabled their viewers to decide if they liked the recipe immediately. This increased the likelihood of them hitting retweet if the recipe appealed to them.With each retweet, exponentially more people will see the recipe, which means more people will consider buying Kahlua in order to make it.

If you have a particular goal in mind with your visual content, consider taking this same step yourself!

5. Maple Leaf Foods (@MapleLeafFoods)

Sometimes the best branding doesn’t seem like branding at all. With this image, Maple Leaf Foods has marketed itself to 23,000 Twitter followers, and many of them may not even know that it’s happened.

Appehtite.ca is Maple Leaf Food’s online recipe magazine (we love the Canadian quip in App”eh”tite). When you visit the site though, there isn’t much that tells visitors the site is owned by Maple Leaf Foods. You’d have to scroll wayyy down to the bottom and read the copyright text in the footer to put two and two together!

However, when you start reading the recipes, it becomes more clear. Each recipe calls for a Maple Leaf Foods product of some kind.

This is a wonderful example of marketing that puts the audience first! Maple Leaf Foods understands that recipes are of major appeal to their viewers, and the less they feel propositioned to buy into a specific brand, the more open they are to viewing them.

Appehtite is their way of reaching interested audience members, while making their content less about Maple Leaf Foods and more about delicious meals. The fact that these delicious meals can just-so-happen to be made with Maple Leaf products, well, that’s a bonus!

This image tells viewers that they can make this delicious bowl of hearty turkey chili by visiting appehtite.ca, and for Maple Leaf Foods, that’s enough.

From there, their audience can decide to purchase their products to complete the recipe. But it’s up to them! And that the beauty of subtle (but effective) marketing.

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