Brands & Consumers

#Dinner in America

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The Smart Social Report
 Tracking Food Love State by State
When you want to spend your marketing dollars wisely and make sure your campaigns
truly speak your customers' language, you rely on market research. Whether you’re making
sure a new idea makes sense for the market or fixing past mistakes, market research has
long been a reliable answer—but it's also pricey and time-consuming. Because of this,
market research is often a luxury afforded to only the biggest brand advertisers.

But thanks to social, marketers essentially have access to a full market research report
at a moment’s notice. Lack of data is no longer a problem facing marketers—if anything,
it’s the inverse. So what kind of data is worth tracking to learn more about your target
market? And how can social data help you unlock unexpected insights about, for example,
geography and brand preference?

With these questions in mind, we set about analyzing data from branded hashtags across
the United States. We chose to hone in on food, to see what regional differences exist.
State by state, we aggregated the data: Where
did people love Braum’s? What about Dunkin
Donuts? And most importantly: What can
we learn from these differences?

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The Smart Social Report
 Methodology
Whenever a photo is uploaded to Instagram there’s an option to include the photo’s location. This is a way for people to
let their followers know exactly where to go if they want in on the pictured fun.

We wanted to find instances where a brand name was used as a hashtag. A branded hashtag is a strong signal of affinity
because the user must manually type and consider the hashtag as they’re posting their perfectly filtered photo. Our
dataset included 97 fast food or casual restaurant chains from all over the United States. We gathered photos from June
2015 through mid-January 2016, then analyzed only those that had geographic information—around half a million photos.

Most Instagrammed Restaurant Brands

200

150
Instagram Post (thousands)

100

50

Starbucks In-N-Out Shake Shack Cheesecake Dunkin IHOP Krispy Kreme McDonalds Hooters Olive
Factory Donuts Garden

* FULL BRAND LIST: Applebees, Arby’s, Au Bon Pain, Baskin Robbins, Ben & Jerry’s, Big Boy Burgers, Biscuitville, Bojangles Chicken, Bonefish Grill, Boston Market, Braum’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Burger King, Captain
D’s, Carl’s Jr, Carrabas, Carvel, Charley’s, Cheddar’s, Cheesecake Factory, Chick-fil-A, Chili’s, Chipotle, Chuck E. Cheese’s, Church’s Chicken, CiCi’s Pizza, Cinnabon, California Pizza Kitchen, Cracker Barrel, Culver’s, Dairy
Queen, Del Taco, Denny’s, Domino’s, Einstein Brother’s Bagels, El Pollo Loco, Famous Dave’s, Firehouse Subs, Five Guy’s Burgers, Friendly’s, Golden Corral, Graeter’s, Hardee’s, Hooters, IHOP, In-N-Out, Ivar’s, Jack In
The Box, Jamba Juice, Jason’s Deli, Jersey Mike’s Subs, Jet’s Pizza, Jimmy John’s, KFC, Krispy Kreme, Krystal Burger, Little Ceasar’s, Logan’s Roadhouse, Long John Silver’s, Macaroni Grill, McDonald’s, Olive Garden, On
The Border, Outback Steakhouse, P. Terry’s, Panda Express, Panera, Papa John’s, P.F. Chang’s, Pita Pit, Pizza Hut, Popeye’s, Qdoba, Quiznos, Red Lobster, Red Robin, Ruth’s Chris, Sbarro, Schlotsky’s, Shake Shack,
Smash Burger, Sonic, Steak ‘n Shake, Subway, Taco Bell, Tasty Burger, Texas Roadhouse, TGIFriday’s, Umami Burger, Voodoo Donut, Waffle House, Wendy’s, Whataburger, White Castle, Zaxby’s

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The Smart Social Report
 Starbucks
#Starbucks, perhaps as no surprise,
is in a league of its own. It’s used
6.4x more frequently than #Innout,
the next-most used hashtag, and on
the state level it was the most-used
hashtag in every state except Vermont,
which uses #benandjerrys the most.

This speaks to both the brand

strength of Starbucks and the nature
of Instagram. Instagrammers use the
network to curate a view into their life.
It’s obvious that Starbucks has become
a major part of many Americans’ daily
lives—plus, who doesn’t enjoy a good
cup of coffee?

To dive into regional

differences we needed
to exclude our outlier,
Starbucks. Once we did this,
a more robust picture of the
United States emerged.

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The Smart Social Report
 The United States Does #Dinner
Our first finding was that the most popular brands aren’t necessarily those with the most physical locations.
Looking closer, we can see Dunkin Donuts consuming the East Coast, and there’s both a Cracker Barrel belt and a
Krispy Kreme belt through the South. Meanwhile on the West Coast, In-N-Out is the only burger that matters.

Excluding Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts is

the top brand in eight states compared
to Krispy Kreme’s four, but when you add
the population of those states together
it represents the same amount of
Americans—about 10%.

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The Smart Social Report
 Shake Shack and In-N-Out
In-N-Out has been a regional favorite in California since it was founded in the 1940s,
but it has been expanding its footprint dramatically and its reputation is following.
Shake Shack was established in 2004, but its youth only seems to be working in its
favor. This demonstrates that even in a saturated and mature market like dining,
there is always room for a new brand to gain a share of voice on a national level.

In-N-Out just barely edged out Shake Shack with the total number of photos tagged.
Though each burger joint dominated in four states, considering population, In-N-Out
is preferred by 16 percent of Americans, compared to
11 percent who nosh on Shake Shack.

Smaller Brands
There are several states where brands like Braum’s (Oklahoma) or Graeter’s Ice Cream (Ohio) are
the most hashtagged. Many of these will be unknown if you’ve never visited these states, but local
favorites have a tremendous advantage in this dataset. Many people in the area will have decades of
associations with them or visitors will want to show the unique thing they’re doing while traveling or
heading back home.

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 Rhode Island & Sonic
When looking at a smaller state like Rhode Island, we were able to uncover the impact that an entry to a new market
can have for a brand. We charted the cumulative usage of each hashtag in the state on a monthly basis. Yes, aside from
Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts is overwhelmingly the most used hashtag in the state, but a new brand appears in October
and becomes the second-most used during the time we were studying.

Rhode Island by Month Cumulative

Dunkin Donuts Ben & Jerry’s Sonic

180

160

140
Totla Number of Photos

120

100

80

60

40

20

June July August September October November December January

Sonic opened their first location within the state in October of 2015, and people trying out the midwestern fast food
chain mentioned it frequently enough to rise above the other entrenched food choices in the state. So even if a brand
isn’t new, its new arrival in a location could herald a change in branded hashtag sentiment and activity.

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The Smart Social Report
 Making What's Neat into Something Concrete
Social data is about so much more than hashtags. Marketers can add additional layers like the geography we focused
on within this study to more finely hone their brand voice.

So how else can this type of brand research be applied—and done well?

Spend Effectively:
Tracking your brand's hashtag by location can help demonstrate the effectiveness of dedicated real world ad spend.
These correlations can help your team decide where to allocate budget effectively for your next campaign.
Learn The Language:
Are you targeting a specific region of the United States on Instagram? When doing so, consider placing a regional
favorite into your Instagram photo collages. If you’re aiming to relate to a specific geographic audience this can help
identify brand associations that are more resonant than might initially be evident.
Competitive Analysis:
Why are your competitors being talked about more than you—and where? Not only can you find areas where your
brand is stronger, but by looking at other commonly used hashtags for your competition, you can uncover what
products you might need to reposition or improve to better compete.

Marketers can apply social data analysis like that explored above at any scale, thereby removing some of the
advantages that used to only be enjoyed by the largest brands with the biggest budgets. Data is now democratized:
in the past, a brand might’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to divine uplift from a billboard campaign, but
now marketers can see campaign results in real time.

Data is now democratized

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 Spredfast is transforming the way
companies connect with consumers.
Spredfast’s smart social software enables companies to build lasting
relationships with today’s digitally connected consumer. Part of that is using
social data to make smarter marketing decisions when you plan, execute,
and analyze your social efforts.

Spredfast Intelligence provides a searchable lens to historical and real-time

insights to better understand your audience, relevant conversations, and
your brand’s social performance.

See the brands we work with:

Learn More

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