Competence cues drive engagement with food posts on Facebook: Convergent multimodal evidence from the field

In the increasingly saturated social media landscape of the food services sector, understanding what drives consumer engagement with food advertisements is critical for marketers. Despite the ubiquity of food promotional content on Facebook, academic research has paid limited attention to understanding how food cues interact with other persuasive cues in shaping consumer response. Focusing on promotional content published by quick-service restaurants and delivery services, two studies (N = 22,475) show how textual and visual elements shape content-sharing behaviour. Using text processing and automated image analysis, the studies explored how warmth and competence cues moderate the persuasiveness of food cues. Across all studies, results consistently revealed that competence cues strengthen the association between food cues and shares, whereas warmth cues either reduced or nullified it. These findings challenge the conventional assumptions in food marketing and offer a multimodal, data-driven perspective on the relative importance of competence cues in Facebook advertisements.