Do
you love delicious foods? Are you willing to try different foods from different
countries and areas? Can you devote your time, money, and energy to searching
for yummy foods, for example, driving 2 hours just for a 5-star spaghetti? If
all the answers are YES, then do you like cook? Are you good at cuisine? If no,
then we are the same kind of foodies, which I would call “amateur foodies”. As
an amateur foodie, I bet you must have watched some videos like the following
one:
In the Tasty videos, deft, creative hands play the leading roles.
Tasty videos simplified the complex cooking procedures by some editing tactics,
such as fast-forward the repetitive process, emphasize the main cooking steps
and give brief explanations of ingredients and dosages. Two special features of
Tasty videos make them more impressive. First, video producers shoot the foods
and ingredients vertically so that the materials can be displayed more
comprehensively and audience can understand every step better. Second, they make
the clips from first person point of view, which would attract audience
attention and interests to watch. From this given angle, audience will consider
that it is themselves who are cooking. After they finish a less than a minute
video, they may even believe they can cook the dish immediately (although most
of them only know how to cook with eyes not hands! hhhhhh). 
The
producer of Tasty videos is BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is an American internet mediacompany based in New York City. The firm describes itself as a “social news and
entertainment company” with a focus on digital media and digital technology in
order to provide “the most shareable breaking news, original reporting,
entertainment, and video.” BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 as a viral lab,
focusing on tracking viral content, by Jonah Peretti and other co-founders. Tasty
is a cooking channel BuzzFeed created for Facebook, concentrating on comfort
food. It had over eighty million followers as of January 2017 on Facebook. As
BuzzFeed’s slogan said, “The media company for the social age”, they have made
a very good use of social media. 
BuzzFeed
knows how to take advantage of Facebook’s special features. They optimize one
of Facebook’s most interesting features for videos named autoplay. The video
posted on the Facebook can be played without sound automatically when users
browse the pages. Tasty makes videos with bright tone and simple words
explanations so that users could understand the videos even without sound.
Think about ourselves and you will find how lazy sometimes the netizens could
be! In a lot of circumstances, when it requires me to click and open a new page
in order to watch a video, I am very likely to give it up, especially when the
video has nothing to do with me, just for fun. I bet you would do the same thing,
GIVE UP. BuzzFeed knows how to attract users and accumulate traffic and they
are very clever to make such short and lucid videos that users even needn’t
click the video and can understand it thoroughly. It is user-friendly.
Then, do
the Tasty videos perform well on social media sites? The answer would be “Of
course!”. The Tasty page on Facebook has 82,197,776 followers and has been
liked by 82,291,383 users. On Jan 14, 2016, a 45-second clip to make acheese-stuffed pizza pretzel was made. Within 24 hours, that video had 37million views, 650,000 likes and 750,000 shares. On Feb 28, 2017, the same video
has collected 110 million views, 1.02 million likes, 2,100,953 shares and
164,729 comments. After a year, the views in 2017 become treble of views in
2016. 
Let’s
monitor some recent data. We choose three high traffic social media sites to
monitor the data and its changes: Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
Up to Feb
25 (Sat), 2017, 8.4 million Instagram users have followed Tasty IG page. The
video “Steak Fajita Quesadillas” posted on Instagram has 1,811,276 views on Feb
25, as well as 2,122 comments. 82,124,837 Facebook users have followed their FB
page. On Facebook, the video named “Cabernet-Braised Short Ribs” has been
viewed for 8.73 million times, liked for 100,000 times with 9589 commentss. The
video “7 Japanese Desserts from Tasty” on YouTube has accumulated 406,083
views. Another video “French Toast Roll-Ups 4 Ways” has collected 40,576 views.
On Feb 26
(Sun), 2017, 8.4 million Instagram users, roughly as much as the day before,
have followed Tasty IG page. The same video, “Steak Fajita Quesadillas” has
collected 2,126,078 views, 314,804 views more than that on Feb 25. The comments
on IG has increased to 2,242 on Feb 26. On Facebook, the number of Tasty page
followers has become 82,189,170. The video “Cabernet-Braised Short Ribs” has
been viewed for 9.01 million times, 280,000 times more than that on Feb 25. The
video “7 Japanese Desserts from Tasty” on YouTube has collected 472,437 views
and the other video “French Toast Roll-Ups 4 Ways” has collected amazing
250,027 views, more than 6 times as much as that on Feb 25! 
When we
use Google Trends to describe the development of BuzzFeed Tasty videos, we can
get such several charts and graphs.In the first
graph, Search Interest in BuzzFeed Tasty, Last 5 Years, we can observe peaks
and the latest peaks was from Jan 8, 2017 to Jan 14, 2017, which reached at
100. The whole trend of the topic “BuzzFeed Tasty” is upward.
The topic “BuzzFeed
Tasty” is most discussed in North America followed by the UK. In New York, the
topic is discussed most heatedly. Then LA, Toronto, Chicago and London follow. As to relative topics, the search volume of “BuzzFeed”
is soaring. The search volume of key words like “tasty buzzfeed recipes”, “tasty
recipes” and “buzzfeed recipes” are also soaring.
Tasty
videos also have caused groundswell. Every video posted on social media sites
no matter on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, can always have thousands of
comments. On Instagram, people always mention friends with the videos. Some of
them just want to share the video with others and a big number of people want
to try the recipe with friends. One Facebook and YouTube, people are more
interactive. They are more willing to express their thoughts and ideas about
the videos, like or hate and reasons.
BuzzFeed,
as a media company, has done a good job, especially on launching the Tasty
project. For one thing, they concentrate
on social media sites special features and make fully use of these features, producing
content which are best for these sites and attracting so many traffic. For
another thing, they also choose a very good topic--- foods. You may love dogs
more than cats. Your friends may disagree with you and think cats are much
better. However, everyone has the same desire for delicious foods. Food is a
big topic in our daily life and dining is one of the major activities we must
have every day. Using food and recipes as a concentration is clever and
attractive. BuzzFeed successfully chose a simple and low-cost way, producing
videos, to attract attention by social media.
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