Amplifying Outreach Through Influencer Engagement

Background: The way people are getting their food has changed, whether it’s through meal kits, grocery delivery or prepared food delivery. More than one-third of suburban and urban respondents said they used online food delivery services or restaurant apps to order food. 72% of Americans said the pandemic changed the way they eat and prepare food. Millennials and Gen Zers are most likely to use delivery apps, with 63% of individuals aged 18 to 29 reporting using a delivery app or website in the last three months.

Program background: Due to changing food sourcing habits, a new messaging strategy was developed to communicate safe food handling of delivered foods. In August 2021, the Partnership launched Prep Yourself, a national campaign to help food delivery users ensure the safety of their meal kits, grocery delivery, and prepared food deliveries. A robust social media push to engage PFSE’s followers and consumers was essential to driving traffic to the site and ultimately educating and reaching consumers. This strategy included partnering with social media influencers to amplify and maximize reach. Registered dietitians and chefs were identified as ideal partners because they are trusted sources for food information. Their followers are also naturally more interested in and aware of food safety requirements.

Evaluation Methods and Results: PFSE identified two social media influencers to help promote Prep Yourself messaging in 2022. Ayat Sleymann MS, RD (@momnutritionist) promoted Prep Yourself messages on TikTok and Instagram. Her three posts reached a total audience of 84,811. Compared to TikTok, Instagram's community was more engaged with the content and reached a much larger audience. 85% of viewers were women aged 25 to 34 located in the United States. Beginning in September 2022, PFSE partnered with Christina Allingham (@biteofnewengland), a food science Ph.D. candidate, to post videos on Instagram and TikTok promoting Prep Yourself messages. With two posts, Christina reached a total audience of 31,781. These two influencers’ posts reached a total audience of 116,592. Compared to PFSE’s typical social posting on these subjects, working with influencers reached more people, in a short time period, and garnered more meaningful engagements than on our own channels.

Conclusions: Partnering with social media influencers can help reach more people to raise awareness of public health messages related to safely handling delivered food. It’s important to identify and work with influencers who have a following that may be interested in learning this content or could benefit from this content.

Implications for research and/or practice: These early results indicate that people are willing to receive preventative health communications on food safety from trusted social media influencers. Next steps would be to test the reception of these messages through partnerships with social media influencers that do not already have a food-oriented following but instead have a following of a target audience for illness prevention. An additional layer to influencer engagement is evaluation. Determining a way to assess behavior changes after exposure to messaging will be key to developing successful messaging campaigns with influencers.