Predicting social media engagement with computer vision: An examination of food marketing on Instagram
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a crowded social media marketplace, restaurants often try to stand out by showcasing elaborate “Instagrammable” foods. Using an image classification machine learning algorithm (Google Vision AI) on restaurants’ Instagram posts, this study analyzes how the visual characteristics of product offerings (i.e., their food) relate to social media engagement. Results demonstrate that food images that are more confidently evaluated by Google Vision AI (a proxy for food typicality) are positively associated with engagement (likes and comments). A follow-up experiment shows that exposure to typical-appearing foods elevates positive affect, suggesting they are easier to mentally process, which drives engagement. Therefore, contrary to conventional social media practices and food industry trends, the more typical a food appears, the more social media engagement it receives. Using Google Vision AI to identify what product offerings receive engagement presents an accessible method for marketers to understand their industry and inform their social media marketing strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".