Social Media Brand Focus: Krispy Kreme On Instagram

Some brands are just made for social media. You have your Coca Cola and your McDonald’s for example. These brands, iconic and established, seamlessly fit into the modern marketing model.

Okay, their budgets are enormous and a lot of what goes on in the numerous accounts they have is developed by large creative teams with no restraint. That helps.

Krispy Kreme, the doughnut specialists, have never really been as busy as the huge brands. The company has often been watching from the sidelines, even before the explosion of social media and its use as a legitimate and effective marketing tool.

But recently, Krispy Kreme has come up with a couple of strong moves of its own. We think they’re as clever and as effective as anything McDonald’s, for example, is doing right now.

Current Numbers

Krispy Kreme does have a strong social presence. We can’t deny that. Our metrics show a company that is engaging with its audience, and also keeping things at a strong level of frequency.

We took a look at their Facebook and Instagram work and the kind of response it is getting.

With Facebook, things are kind of slow. Facebook is obviously something that isn’t working for them as much as it could do. In fact, our charts actually threw up something quite alarming. The audience growth metric actually sees a decline in the number of likes on Facebook, in patches at least. The general audience growth is flatlining, with only intermittent spurts.

Engagement has gone up during the period between the start of April and the middle of May 2017, but we get the feeling that not a lot of attention has been given to their page. There are long stretches in April, for example, where post engagement has literally been zero.

And then we get to the engagement rate. And this is where the obvious shortfalls are. The engagement rate for the brand on Facebook is not great. The best at the moment is 0.7% with the best performing post. Not pretty, and something that Krispy Kreme should be on top of.

Go to Instagram though, and we see a brand that’s putting in some great work. The very top performing post for engagement rate carries an impressive 2.97%. This shows that the brand is either neglecting Facebook or they are just ‘better’ on Instagram.

Let’s look at what they are doing on Instagram.

Colour, and more colour, with extra colour

Krispy Kreme does have a strong social presence. We can’t deny that. Our metrics show a company that is engaging with its audience, and also keeping things at a strong level of frequency.

We think Krispy Kreme has realised that the biggest pull factor in their product is the colourful nature of the doughnuts. On top of this, Krispy Kreme goes to town on styles and looks with their range.

And this means that there is (literally) plenty of eye candy that they can exploit for the audience. People go to an outlet and they generally pick outlandish and ‘different’ doughnuts, the kind that the brand has worked hard to literally design.

Let us take a look at some of the most recent post on Instagram. As you gaze at it, take in the absolute magnificence of the colours. The brand knows it has an advantage over other brands, even those in the food and drink industry because it has bright, visually appealing products that grab your attention immediately.

The attention-grabbing content makes it a perfect home for the brand. Instagram allows the company to create essentially what is the same shot multiple times. People notice the colours and the frankly quite attractive prospect of eating one of the famous doughnuts.

This is all about playing to their strengths. Krispy Kreme knows that people are sold on the look of the product as much as anything else, so they literally show their wares in the best light possible.

Taking a look at another recent post on Instagram only confirms that this might be one of the easiest sells on Instagram in the whole world.

So they have mastered Instagram. There really isn’t much for them to do further than keep it simple and focus on the product. Or is there?

If we were Krispy Kreme

What we see as an area of improvement is the use of hashtags. They use them, but not in the way we think they should.

Having a single hashtag in a post is all well and good, but to improve this even further, we reckon the brand could push harder on the tags. Knowing which tags to use is obviously important, but as long as they focus on quantity they should find a pretty instant increase in engagement.

We also think that the brand could explore using hashtags that are well-received. This means taking something like #throwbackthursday and seeing if the Krispy Kreme brand can capitalise on this.

It will seem like opportunism if it isn’t done right, but the one thing we would do with this account is look at some classic doughnuts and then use the #throwbackthursday to spark off some nostalgia.

Then on Instagram (and Facebook) we would run a contest to see which ‘classic’ version of their doughnuts the audience would like to see come back. It makes sense to do this. The brand has an established style and audience, and they’re loyal.

This connection with their audience is the next logical step for Krispy Kreme on Instagram. We think they are missing a trick here, and should be jumping all over the potential in running competitions, asking questions and so on.

This is not to say that they aren’t doing this already here and there, but as an improvement, it seems appropriate.

The perfect mix of colour and movement

St Patrick’s Day seems a long way back now, but we think one of the posts that really defines the Krispy Kreme ethos on social media was linked to that holiday.

Krispy Kreme marketed a rather fetching new doughnut, which is green. And then they added to the impact of that colour by including a video on Instagram that was just intriguing.

Watching the video you soon see that yes, it is very short, but it looks amazing. Here we have a brand that not only shows great video content, but also allows us into the process behind making the product.

They’ve kept to their principles and made it all visually attractive. Krispy Kreme isn’t Coca Cola or McDonald’s, but when it comes to using Instagram in the very best way possible, their ideas are as fresh and informed as the ideas of those two huge brands.

The message? Play to your strengths and find the right platform for it.