Photo & Social Media guides
As the Manager of Content Strategy at Levy, a leading foodservice hospitality company, I saw a need for better quality photography and social media posts from all Levy locations to showcase the high-quality food made across the company. I created easy-to-use guides for the chefs and social media managers to help boost their confidence, photography skills, and ultimately the social posts’ quality.
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Levy team members across the country needed to be able to photograph the food they were creating for social media better, and they needed to be able to independently run social media accounts for their respective property. The quality of photos and videos was extremely poor, making the quality of the Levy’s food look poor in turn.
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Chefs don’t have time to take photos of their food.
Lighting in arenas, stadiums, ballparks, and convention centers is notoriously bad.
Age can feel like a barrier when it comes to social media and technology adoption, and often chefs felt they weren’t able to use social media efficiently.
Texting or emailing photos to me from a phone was a challenge for some team members (limited cell service in locations/unable to walk the floor of locations with their phone out per company code of conduct) so they needed to be empowered to upload their own images to social media with captivating captions at their convenience.
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To help our chefs become better photographers and social media gurus, I created two quick getting started guides for photography and social media. These guides addressed the pain points that chefs and team members were having, helping them understand not only how to make their photos better, but why these small changes would work.
Step 1: I used my background as a photographer and social media strategist to put together the basic principles of both topics, and assembled two guides with straightforward, getting started steps.
Step 2: I tested my guides out on my own team (who also had little photography knowledge) to make sure the guide was clear, concise, and would be used by our team members across the country.
Step 3: Working with small test groups of chefs and managers from various locations, I provided the photography and social media guides during in-person training sessions. I talked through the guides with the group, and then asked them to perform a small photo challenge during lunch to see how much they had retained. The participants were asked to take a photo of their lunch anywhere in our office, send their photos to me, and we then reviewed and critiqued the photos together as a group afterwards.
This activity was extremely useful for the groups, all of them responded back positively saying they felt more confident taking photos, and they passed the guides along to their respective teams once they were back at their home locations.
Step 4: To scale the effect and reach of the photo and social media guides, I also worked with each of our locations to elect a social media representative for their site, and asked those people to join a monthly phone call.
Step 5: For the initial social media call, I talked the team members through the guides, answering their questions along the way and helping them all become more comfortable running a social media account for their location. The successive monthly calls were used to discuss trends, challenges, and successes I was seeing on social media and in photography, as well as answer any challenges or pain points team members were experiencing.
After only three months, the overall quality of the photography and social media content for all accounts improved drastically. People felt more confident on social media, they were having fun taking photos, and felt that they were making an active difference in showing the high quality of the food and customer service that Levy delivered.
