In this instructional video recorded in South Lanarkshire, the presenter explains how highly visual food and drink posts—referred to as “food porn”—can dramatically boost social‑media engagement for small independent food businesses. Using a local takeaway’s milkshake campaign as a case study, she describes the “M and S effect,” where vivid images and descriptive copy generate nostalgia, curiosity, and a strong desire to comment, tag friends, and inquire about price. The talk then shifts to concrete tactics: tagging relevant brands, staff, and partners; leveraging a content‑calendar tool (e.g., searching for “Valerio’s” or “Taylor’s”) to discover, duplicate, or repost successful posts; selecting appropriate channels; and scheduling posts for optimal reach. Finally, she highlights a 24/7 support button for any questions. The overall message is that detailed, appetizing visual content combined with strategic tagging and content‑curation tools can turn food images into powerful conversation drivers on social media.
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Today we're in South Lanarkshire and we're looking at how food porn is everything. This independent takeaway business in Lanark loves to celebrate food that they sell. They love to talk about their staff, they love to get involved in community projects like they do here. So they're really, really strong on social media. But what they've realised is that their best post by and what gets great engagement is actually their food. And here it was their milkshake. So here they're saying, try our new amazing milkshakes made with delicious tailors of bigger ice cream. And then they go into all the flavors and they've done some absolutely beautiful images here. So these images, coupled with the amazing descriptions, these are all the different amazing flavors that you can get, has got everybody flocking to want to come down and try some of the delicious drinks. But most importantly, it's got people sharing and it's got people commenting. So over the last few years, the M and S effect, as we call it, has really taken off with people showing a delicious food and delicious food or drink on social media, getting really into the nitty gritty of the detail. And it's generally enough to whet anyone's appetite, make their mouth water and want them to share it and tag a friend that they might want to actually share the drink with. And if you look at just some of the comments, people are excited about this, so that people are asking how much it is. So again, they don't even want to go onto the website to find out. They just straight away want to find out. People are tagging in their friends, people are saying, you know, I used to love a milkshake years ago, when are the pizza's coming back? And then they're making sure that they're responding back to them. So this has gotten something that a lot of other businesses might not have, that this is an established business. So this milkshake has generated nostalgia, it's generated excitement, it's created that sort of, you know, as I say, the wetting of the appetite that only really a food image or a drink image can do. So if you've got delicious food, then the devil is in the detail. Get descriptive and show the images in all their glory. But also don't miss a trick. So if this is Taylor's, a bigger ice cream, if they've got a Facebook page, make sure that you tag them. Make sure that you tag in any of the brands that you're working with, any of the staff members that want to be tagged, or anything else in that image. That might help you drive a bit of reach as well. Now, if you want some inspiration from Valerio's, then all you do is you go onto your content calendar on the maybe platform and then this is your content at the top. And then you just type in Valerio's, which shows here, and then this will come up with their content and you'll see their content below. Now, what this does is it gives you a real snapshot as to what they're doing and you can actually view the post. There you go. So you can see what the post was. This is obviously a bit of bacon from. You can also choose to go in and duplicate it as well. So you can choose to go in and actually create a post off the back of it. So you might want to repost it and support the business. Or it might be something that you think, oh, this looks delicious. All you do is select which channel you want, click in here to add in the post, and then you can even schedule it for later if you like as well. There's so much that you can do when you are taking inspiration from a brand, maybe a campaign or business. Now, if you've got any questions whatsoever, just click on the little blue button here. It connects you to us 24 7. We love to help.
