Millions of people take pictures of their food and drink every day; and so much so that we have specific hashtags like #FoodPorn used globally for people to use to show off the delicious food they are about to eat.
If you’re looking to jump on this trend and in order to increase your social engagement, you’re probably wondering how you can make your event’s food and drink more photo friendly.
Here are 6 tips for making food and drink at your next event photo friendly, so you can get people snapping away and sharing their pictures on their social channels.
Lighting
The most important thing to get right is the lighting of your venue. If you want people to be able to take amazing pictures and to be able to show off every detail, people need to be able to see them!
I’m sure you’ve been to events before where the lighting of the venue has meant you haven’t been able to take a decent picture, and having the flash on illuminates the picture too much. Get the lighting right and you’ll create the perfect opportunity for people to snap away.
Food sculptures
We’ve all seen food sculptures like swans made from apples feature in a centrepiece or as a decoration by a buffet. They have become overused, but this is your opportunity to play on this cliche.
Above is a great example of a more contemporary food sculpture; utilising the fruit as a decorative bowl, and being used to contain more food within it too. If you were to serve a dessert within the above, you’d be sure that people would be impressed by the design and would want to share this with people.
Impressive looking cocktails
If you’re creating a special drinks list especially for an event, you need to make sure that these drinks look impressive.
If you’re creating cocktails, you need to make sure they are decorated to the max, almost creating a little piece of art that will make people want to show-off this amazing cocktail they are about to drink. Create a unique or funny name for your drinks and people will want one, purely to say they’ve had it. Just look at how many people order a ‘sex on the beach’ just to say they’ve had it!
Social handles & hashtags
Image ©Dan Taylor/Heisenberg Media via Flickr
Getting people to share photos is one thing, but it’s important to let people know the exact hashtags and social handles you want them to use. Failing to do this can mean people’s images are shared with all different hashtags, without one common one to connect them all, meaning it’s harder to see the social impact of your event, both for you and your attendees.
Create one hashtag for the event for the use of all social handles and make sure people can see it everywhere. The above shows Social Media Week London, where their hashtag is displayed on entry and can be found all over the venue and on screens too.
Novelty food design
This idea comes from the bento boxes that are designed specifically to look more attractive and unique. Essentially the above is just vegetables, meat and rice. Nothing special at all. However, by creating the novelty design like the above bears, these rice balls suddenly become more than just boring old rice.
This is something people would buy purely to take a picture of. It is of course important to make sure the food still tastes good, so don’t compromise that purely for design.
Shock & awe
Burger King’s black burger has been shared and discussed worldwide. People are disgusted, intrigued, and surprised to name just a few emotions, but the fact is people want to try the burger and are sharing images of it to show people they’ve been brave enough to try it. All Burger King had to do was change the colour of the bun and people went nuts over it!
Maybe you can follow in their footsteps and play around with the look of the food to create something people are going to have mixed feelings about, but will want to share with people because it’s just so different from anything they’ve seen before.
