#healthy: an analysis of the social media presence of healthy restaurants in Barcelona

Abstract

Social media is shaping today’s restaurant industry: Being able to provide information and insights of a restaurant for potential customers without them ever having visited the establishment is a game changer. Not only does it work as an information supply point for visitors; at the same time, it is essential for the marketing branch of the restaurant (Duggan & Smith, 2013). With regard to the restaurant sector in Barcelona, social media has become a subject in this city as well, given the fact that it helps customers in the decision making on which restaurant to visit (Liang et al., 2011). On the other hand, the trend of living a healthy lifestyle has been a trend for a while now in the society and the restaurant sector has not been spared the results of it Myung, McCool & Feinstein, 2008): While more and more establishments that offer healthy food options are being built, it seems crucial for people to find healthy menu items which, in turn, concludes in a satisfactory experience for the customer (Opolski-Medeiros & Salay, 2013). But what does it take for a healthy restaurant to have a lot of engagement and hence be successful on social media? In the following written work, it will be discussed what it takes for a healthy restaurant to push through a favorable social media strategy, which will be shown by the qualitative and quantitative investigation of fifteen healthy restaurants with the location of Barcelona. In the analysis, which works with data that has been acquired from May 1st until May 29th, 2019 on the social media platforms Instagram and Facebook, as well as on the review platform TripAdvisor, the behaviors and characteristics of the restaurant sample are being evaluated through chosen indicators. In the end, best practice cases will be shown, and there will be a social media content plan for a healthy restaurant as well, to incorporate the results of the findings. What the results show, is that every restaurant of the sample has a different approach to their social media presence: While as some restaurants have preferences in terms of platforms and different strategies for each social media outlet, others tend to feed the social media platforms with identical images or videos and same amount of content. With reference to the reached engagement on posts and social media profiles, Instagram appears to be the platform where as a restaurant, the most engagement can be gained through likes and comments. Nonetheless, through calculating the mean of the best practice cases of the sample the outcome is, in order to obtain a higher engagement score, the restaurant should post the same amount of content on Instagram and Facebook.