Food businesses that have relied on Instagram to build, maintain and grow their followings have been hit hard by recent changes in the social media app’s algorithm.
Specifically, businesses that had seen high engagement with a social strategy centered on photography and captions have been left by the wayside as the platform has begun to surface videos and deprioritize still images, The New York Times reported Tuesday (March 22).
“I completely credit them for our growth — and then the algorithm changed, and our sales dropped horrifyingly,” Sana Javeri Kadri, founder of spice company Diaspora Company, told the outlet. “There was a point where I was having dreams that Instagram could go back to the way things were, and my nightmares were about all the reasons why that was impossible.”
In late December, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced the shift in focus to video. Given the higher barrier of entry required to create successful video content — taking nice photographs of an item does not require the resources needed to produce a high-quality video — the change has made it harder for small businesses to stand out on the platform.
In the first year of the pandemic, Instagram was a vital tool for many food businesses, helping them build their followings as consumers spent less time walking by storefronts and more time on their phones. Take, for instance, the many bakeries that began using the social network both to build affinity and to drive conversion.
Read more: Pandemic-Native Microbakeries Use Social Media to Attract at-Home Consumers
“So, the way we’re set up … is we use our Instagram to market directly to our clients, communicate our day-to-day routines, show them that we’re human, show them we make mistakes, build … a grassroots, real connection with our clientele,” Pandemic Donuts Co-Owner Michael Milton told PYMNTS in a March 2021 interview. “And then we push our clientele to our website through our Instagram.”
See more: Pandemic Donuts Uses Social Commerce, Delivery to Thrive
Many eCommerce insiders predict that social commerce will become a much more central part of consumers’ online purchasing routines.
“eCommerce is still only a small slice of U.S. consumer purchasing, with fewer than one in five transactions happening online,” Jessica Anerella, head of product design at Verishop, told PYMNTS. “There’s a lot of room for growth there, and at the same time, eCommerce [and] social media are going to continue to converge.”
Read more: Social Commerce Is the Path to Young, Media-Savvy Consumers
This makes social commerce success especially relevant to businesses that rely on online sales, since the younger consumers who tend to shop online also tend to be the ones shopping on social media. Research from PYMNTS’ 2021 How We Eat Playbook, created in collaboration with Carat from Fiserv, which drew from a census-balanced survey of more than 5,200 U.S. adults, showed 58% of Generation Zers, 59% of millennials and 61% of bridge millennials reported making more food and grocery orders for pickup or delivery than they did before March 2020.
See more: Restaurants and Grocers See Path to Picking up 200M New Customers
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