For this week’s Instagram brand interview, we’ve asked the team behind Plated, to answer our 10 questions. They told us that they “see more engagement and traffic from Instagram than most of our other social channels”. They told us how they interact with their fans and how Instagram helped them develop their brand. They also shared some tips on their Instagram usage & strategy.
About:
Plated delivers everything you need to cook chef-designed recipes at home, making it simpler and more inspiring to eat well. Each week, you’ll discover nine seasonal recipes (plus desserts!), so you can cook homemade meals, all while exploring new cooking techniques and savouring unique ingredients. Bon appétit!
Some Key Statistics
Engagement Rate: 1,05%
Posts on Hashtag: 26,3K
Average Number of Likes: 568
Average Posts per Week: 13
Find out even more key statistics on our Index for Brands
Check out the related Instagram posts of the Interview
Question: @plated posted its first Instagram picture on the 19th of November 2012. Why did you choose to join Instagram?
Answer: It was a no-brainer for us to join Instagram. Each week our customers browse a menu of beautiful food images and choose different meals that they’d like delivered. Being an extremely visual company we wanted a way to share photos of our recipes in a more social manner, and Instagram allowed that.
A photo posted by Plated (@plated) on
Feb 24, 2015 at 2:39pm PST
Q: How relevant is Instagram for a brand like yours?
A: Instagram is extremely relevant for us. We actually see more engagement and traffic from Instagram than most of our other social channels. It’s also an amazing place to build a community!
Q: How has Instagram helped you more than other social networks, to connect with your consumers?
A: Instagram is the main way we connect with our Plated community. We have over 26k #platedpics on Instagram alone and we take the time to respond to each and every one of them! We actually had a customer post a photo that their dog had unfortunately gotten into their box. We then looked up their account, and sent an email with a little discount for their “ruff first delivery”.
Q: How often are you using Direct Message to contact your fans?
A: We will sometimes use it to chat with an influencer or notify someone they won a contest. We don’t use it too often though!
A video posted by Plated (@plated) on
Feb 12, 2015 at 11:16am PST
Q: On your last 100 media posted, you have 3 videos. Why? What is the concept of your videos?
A: When we first posted videos, they weren’t really resonating. We found that videos didn’t garner the same engagement as photos. We then came up with the idea of doing short shareable food hack videos specifically for Instagram. Those have gotten amazing engagement and always receive the most “shares” (friends tagging people). We really love sprinkling some videos into our feed.
Q: What strategies do you use to attract new Instagram followers and keep them engaged?
A: We work a lot with influencers not only to get more followers, but also to spread awareness. Once someone clicks over from the influencer’s post they’ll usually end up following us for the shareable food photos.
Q: How do you measure your brand influence on Instagram?
A: Our main KPIs for Instagram are follower growth, engagement per post, and traffic.
A photo posted by Plated (@plated) on
Feb 4, 2015 at 1:29pm PST
Q: What motivated your choice to join Iconosquare?
A: We only have one person managing all of our social media, so it quickly became exhausting to comment on every single customer photo from a phone. We love being able to use a desktop/laptop to chat with our community!
Q: When posting a media, what is your Like/Comment threshold that makes it acceptable?
A: We honestly don’t have a Like/Comment threshold and it more just comes down to using good judgement. We know that posting a photo of our office culture won’t do as well as a cheesy grilled cheese, but it’s important to still show that content on our feed!
Q: Work aside, what are your 3 accounts you recommend following?
A: Our favorite accounts are:
@Everlane. Everlane goes beyond simply showing photos of their products, they also visually communicate their values as a company which is rare to see and really awesome. Definitely check out #knowyourfactories!
@Sea2Table. We may be a bit biased here (we source most of our seafood from them), but we love being able to see where our ingredients come from. Sea to Table’s feed is a great way to see how your fish gets from sea to…well…table.
@Anthropologie. They know their audience SO well and do a great job incorporating relevant lifestyle imagery into their feed!
Anything else you would like to add or share with the community?
Always remember to take risks and test new content to find what really resonates with your audience! This is how we built our following from the ground up and something that is still important to us today.
The post Brand Interview #33 – How Plated built an active Instagram community of home chefs. appeared first on Blog Iconosquare.