Konichiwa.
My name is Philip Weber.
I'm a PhD student at the department of Cyber Physical Systems at the University of Siegen, together with
my co authors Thomas Ludwig, Sabrina Brodesser and Laura
Grönewald, we wrote the paper on:
"It's a kind of art understanding food influencers as influential content creators"
Let's get into some details.
I skip related work mostly because of the given time constraints, but to summarize, we have looked at
emerging practices and trends on social media and how they are being researched by the HCI
and CHI communities; along with previous research on self-representation
on social media and food related content creators.
Although the reach and influence of food related posts are increasing, no studies
exist at least to the best of our knowledge that examines the creators’ motives,
practices and technology use.
Our study addresses exactly this research gap.
In our paper, we conducted two studies to examine influential food content creators
and their emerging practices.
We did a content analysis of food related social media posts and therefore analyzed
1570 posts from 157 Instagram profiles
of previously identified food content creators.
From that, the following 18 codes emerged.
The high density of food related post is remarkable, here.
Around nine out of 10 posts were related to food and only one in 10 posts
was about non food related content.
Of the food related post, a good two thirds of the posts included a
recipe for the featured food,
20% of the post had only a brief message or consisted only of
Hashtags, and about 16% of the posts clearly stated that
the post was about sponsored content.
In the interview study with 11 influential food content creators, we wanted to
learn more about the processes and practices involved in creating such posts.
We mainly focused on content creators on Instagram, including eight who were highly
ambitious and pursuing these activities as a career;
at the time of the interview. One of our main findings there, was that food content creators
do not use themselves as influencers but rather wish to be perceived as
food bloggers, photographers or content creators.
Based on our studies, we have derived eight work practices in which we have made visible
how software and hardware are used to support these practices. The first step is the
monetization phase, in which content creators communicate via email with companies,
how and what they are supposed to promote.
Platforms such as Patreon are also used to be more financially independent from
individual jobs.
The next phase is about inspiration.
Here, food content creators think about what they want to present as a content and how they
want to portray it.
Besides the use of digital recipe lists and photo collections, it is
interesting that other social networks like Pinterest are also used to draw inspiration from.
To also recognize trends
analysis tools based on Google
search queries and YouTube are utilized here.
In the next step, the food is prepared and the photography set is
constructed.
The positioning of lights, reflectors or light diffusers and the preparation of
foreground and background parts are part of it.
Next; pictures are taken of the prepared food. Here, all but one interviewee stated
that they use professional equipment such as SLR or full frame cameras.
Smartphones are only rarely used and only occasionally mentioned.
For example, when being in a restaurant. After the pictures are taken
they are edited with software like Adobe Light Room and Photoshop, the built-in
filters and presets of Instagram
on the other hand, were controversially discussed. After editing is done,
the content is posted on social media and subsequently monitored.
Monitoring can be quite a time consuming activity, as some interviewees
stated, to react to every comment or direct message.
Also analysis tools, such as Instagram Insights, are used here to measure the
success of the post.
That was just glimpse into our paper for design implications, such as the need for more convenient
ways of monetizing content on Instagram or the need for an improved desktop experience
when preparing and publishing professional content, please check out our paper
There you can also find limitations and detailed information about our research.
We believe our insights on influential food content creators can inspire new
designs and future work on social media to address the needs of this small but
influential user group, thank you for your interest in our work.
We also thank Sebastian Schwarzloh, all interviewed content creators and the CHI
reviewers for the contributions and insightful feedback to this work.
I'm happy to discuss our work with you.
Sayonara