With over 250m followers between them, the fast food giants have a firm grasp of what works on social media. They know that people buy more from brands they like and identify with. So, they fill their feeds with personality and fun. And when Health and fitness brands learn from this approach, they grow like crazy.

Trigger emotional reactions

In the social world, organic reach is typically around 1-2%, so for every brand post people see, there are around 75 they don’t. And the messages they do see have been surfaced by algorithms which promote posts people are reacting to. Emotion drives reaction, so you have to trigger emotional responses to be seen. 

One post with 10 reactions is seen by more people than 10 posts with a single reaction.

Brand personality drives growth

Look at KFC’s feed, for example. Then look at Oatly. For all their different messaging they share a playful, arresting and slightly surreal tone that rewards exploration and discovery.

Oatly’s feed features a mechanical tortoise dragging cans of oat latte around, tubs of ice-cream getting steamy in a sauna to a backing track of ‘Ice-Ice Baby’ and their CEO singing songs in a field. By contrast, competitors Alpro suggest putting a cocktail umbrella in a dessert pot ‘to treat the kids’.

Oatly grew 5x faster than Alpro last year.

Sell the sizzle, not the sausage

Features and benefits, functional messaging, product education. These will only take you so far. People want to laugh more than they want to see a product shot. If brands want to capture attention, they have to be worth paying attention to. 

It’s not just on social. The most emotional, creative ads, create 11x as much profit for brands as the least*. So, if you want your brand to be remembered then create content with scroll-stopping distinction. Because, as David Ogilvy once wrote, “You can’t bore people into buying your product.”

* Source: Binet and Field, The long and the short of it, IPA

Click here to see the full analysis of how the fast food giants generate social fame and how the best health, food and fitness brands are successfully using these strategies to grow faster.

Also published on Medium.