This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: New research from QUT challenges a common assumption in social media marketing: For fast-food brands, social media posts that signal expertise and competence are shared more often than those focused on warmth and friendliness. The study, published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management, found that analytical language and blue-green visual cues encouraged significantly more sharing on Facebook than emotionally expressive captions and warm-colored imagery.
First author and doctoral candidate Uchitha Wijesinghe, from QUT's School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, said the study's findings challenged the widely held assumption that warmth is more persuasive in food advertising on social media than other cues. "In the highly competitive fast-food industry, outlets and delivery services must jostle for consumers' attention and engagement on social media platforms to keep their brands prominent and break through to potential customers," Wijesinghe said. "For marketers, the most valued engagement is content sharing, which is equivalent to offline word-of-mouth recommendations on social media platforms such as Facebook." The researchers conducted two studies: the first on Facebook posts from quick-service restaurants and the second on Facebook posts from mobile app-based food delivery services.
Each study analyzed text and images separately to test how cues of warmth, denoted by warm colors such as yellow and red, and competence, denoted by blue and green, affected social media engagement. The researchers classified "warmth" as emotionally expressive language and "competence" as language reflecting thinking, reasoning, explanation, causation and analytical processing. Food posts containing stronger competence cues were found to be more likely to be shared than posts dominated by emotional language.
In fact, warm colors and emotional captions had a negative effect on sharing. "Our finding that competence-based cues consistently led to stronger engagement through content sharing indicates people look for evidence of expertise and credibility, even in highly visual and competitive social environments, before they pass a post on to friends." Wijesinghe said the results suggested that food cues alone might not be sufficient to generate shares. "The effectiveness of food-related content appears to depend on whether the surrounding message contains visual and text cues that support stronger evaluation of the post," he said.
"When developing text-based content, managers could complement their food-related words with some that reflect thinking, reasoning or explanation, such as 'why choose,' 'because,' 'true or false' or 'this explains.'" "Similarly, food imagery may be strengthened when food-related visual content appears alongside a greater presence of blue and green tones." Uchitha Wijesinghe et al, Competence cues drive engagement with food posts on Facebook: Convergent multimodal evidence from the field, International Journal of Hospitality Management (2027). DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhm.2026.104849 Provided by Queensland University of Technology Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space.
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