Top 10 Food Influencers (KOL) in China
The food industry is a very competitive industry that needs creative marketing campaigns. How to meet the unique tastes of China is a serious problem for the food industry to consider. With the improvement of Chinese people’s living standard, more and more people are paying more attention to an upgraded enjoyment. Food is no longer just fuel for the body, it becomes a way of relaxation and killing time. As a result of this change, the number of China Food influencers(KOL) are booming on all sorts of social media.
Key-Opinion-Leaders (KOL): A powerful tool for companies to increase their products’ exposure and build up the brand image.
Want to enter China market with your innovative food? The Dragon Social team has summed up a list of successful food KOLs in China for you!
Table of content:
Weibo Top 10 Influencers – Read Now
WeChat Influential Official Accounts – Read Now
Top 5 Categories of Food KOLs? – Read Now
Case Study: 办公室小野 – What’s the secret of her popularity? – Read Now
Weibo Top 10 Influencers
1. 日食记
日食记, the most popular KOL in the food industry, with 12.3 million followers, has signed a contract with self-media. It is famous for its cooking videos involving different kinds of food. The video is colourful and inspiring in its demonstration. It shows audiences a comfortable and peaceful lifestyle.
Main content: cooking video, food recipes
2. 办公室小野
办公室小野，a smart food video self-media in Weibo with 5.05 million followers. She is a young lady from Sichuan. She takes “office madwoman” as her hashtag. In February 2017, she became famous for releasing a video series called “office excellent food”. Most of her videos are full of creativity and originality. She also has lots of foreign fans.
Main content: food short video clips
3. 密子君
密子君，another successful food influencer and self-media on Weibo who has 6.15 million followers. She is a young girl born in 1992 and working as an anchorwoman originally. She became famous because of a live broadcast of her finishing 10 barrels of Turkey noodles in 16 minutes and 20 seconds.
Main content: food short video clips, food daily
4. 天天美食推荐
天天美食推荐, an influential food influencer in Weibo with 7.64 million followers. Recommends different food practices every day to share tastes of the world.
Main content: food video & recipe & daily
5. 999道私房菜
999道私房菜，an interesting food influencer on Weibo with 1.384 million followers. Its aim is to share all kinds of tasty food from all around the world and provide its followers a chance to see and make the food themselves.
Main content: food guide & recipe & daily
6. 零食少女
零食少女，a special young food blogger born in 1995, with 2.72 million followers. The style and content of her Weibo are very sweet and energetic. Her specialty is to share snacks with people.
Main content: food guide & sharing & daily
7. 美食环游
美食环游, an excellent food influencer from Shanghai, with 9.77 million followers. Her content shares all kinds of foods all around the world with its evaluation and recommendations.
Main content: food video & sharing.
8. Amanda的小厨房
Amanda的小厨房, a leading food influencer and self-media on WeChat, with 3.42 million followers. She is also an author of Toutiao(头条). She has her original food show <曼食慢语>, which updates every Wednesday onYoukuu, YouTube, and other video websites.
Main content: food video & recipe & daily
9. 大胃爱丽丝
大胃爱丽丝, a leading food influencer and we-media in weibo, with 2.71 million followers. Most of her weibo content is about food evaluation and sharing.
Main content: food sharing, food evaluation, receipt.
10. 牛奶少女
牛奶少女, a unique food influencer and we-media on Weibo, with 2.72 followers. Most of the sharing on her Weibo is about baking and dessert.
Main content: baking recipe and daily
The average influence index (KCI) of top 15 KOLs is over 40, the number of followers per account is over 1.5 million, and the number of thumbs-up microblogs is over 800 times. All accounts have an excellent impact. Among them, the KCL of the top 3 KOLs ranks far ahead of other KOLs on the list.
Ps. KCI refers to the microblog’s self-media influence index, which is a crucial index used to evaluate the influence, impact and user value of microblog’s self-media accounts.
WeChat Influential Official Accounts
Different from Weibo, there are more local food influencers in WeChat who has lots of followers. Their main content is exploring unique food and restaurants in their city. And their followers always come from another city or neighbor district.
There are some official accounts are about one city or district in top 10. Such as No.3(food in Beijing), No.5 (food in Guangzhou), and No.8(food in Shanghai). As we can see, people from big city have a higher demand for delicious food. Naturally, the food and restaurant categories are more diversified in big cities.
If you have interests in these official accounts, you can set up your own WeChat account to follow them or create WeChat official accounts also.
Extended Articles about WeChat:
Top 5 Categories of Food KOLs
According to the food influencers listed above, we can divide them into different categories based on their content.
1.Daily Food Guide & Recipe
Most of the influencers belong to this category. These KOLs share some comments on food and restaurants to tell people where to have popular food. After visiting restaurants, KOLs write a detailed evaluation of the food and recommend what they prefer to people. They will also recommend some recipes and what they eat every day to followers.
Example: 田螺姑娘_hhhaze
An example of the food guide
2. Cooking video tutorial
Besides recipes, some food KOLs will upload cooking lessons. Some KOLs will choose which dish to cook based on people’s comments or a dish’s popularity.
Example: 日食记 Amanda的小厨房
日食记 is good at cooking video
Amanda的小厨房
3. Daily Baking Recipe
Food KOLs will focus on one specific area, such as baking, dessert, foreign food, etc. Baking draws greater attention to people’s lives throughout these years. With a rapid growth of bakeries in every city, there comes more and more KOLs that focus on baking as their main source of content. They explore the newest and the most popular bakeries and products to share with their followers.
Example：王光光光光光光
The receipt of baking
4. Food Picture Sharing
There are several food KOLs who are different from others. What they like is to take photos of food or restaurants. They uploaded these photos to Weibo to attract people’s attention, in which is also a good way for promotion.
5. Photography Teaching for Picturing Food
Since there are food KOLs that taking photos of food. Naturally, there are food KOLs that teach people how to take beaitiful pictures of food.
Example: 24楼妍色
Ten ways to take the photo of cakes easily
Case Study: 办公室小野 – What’s the Secret of Her Popularity?
办公室小野(Xiaoye), a 23-year-old girl from Sichuan who became famous because of a short video named Cooking Hot Pot by the Water Dispenser. The other videos she made will also give you a surprise. Such as Pan-Fried beef by iron, Cooking Pancake by Computer Host, etc. She attracted more than 7 million fans in just four months, which makes her one of the most famous food KOLs in China.
The video made her become famous rapidly, click to see the whole video
In February, Xiaoye began to upload video in different platforms. Up to now, she has 1.434 million fans in 美拍 (Meipai), 1.3 million subscribers on Tencent video, and 573k subscribers on YouTube. Her YouTube subscribers are mostly overseas fans, most of them come from Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and the US.
What makes her so popular? Here are three major reasons that she summarised by herself:
1. Don’t Talk- Xiaoye doesn’t speak in all her short videos, and that seems to be dumb in some fans’ eyes. She laughs at it and says that she does not know what to say, so she just does not speak. Because of her silence, her short video has no language barrier and is more easy to understand for foreigners.
2. Creativity- Xiaoye believes that food is the No.1 common topic of the world. People from all over the world love to explore and taste food. Moreover, the background of the short video is her office, a place that has no relations with food. She combines food with her office to create a sense of novelty and inspiration.
3. Local Materials- Iron, keyboard, computer mainframe, light pipe, water dispenser… Almost everything in the office can be seen in Xiaoye’s video clips. She likes to cook by using local materials, both ingredients and tools. Averagely, her short videos are seven to eight minutes with a lot of jokes averaging every 10 seconds. Every 30 seconds, she does something to prank her colleagues. A most interesting scene is when coffee powder accidentally dropped on the ground, she improvised and made it into a sand painting.
Xiaoye’s short videos are out of the ordinary and full of fun
Nowadays, Xiaoye’s film team has 4-5 people. She was once worried that she will be replaced by someone else, but not anymore. She believes that “good content has high exposure naturally” and believes that there is a bright future for original short video clips.
Conclusion
Many Chinese food bloggers have established a satisfied fan base, and they are happy to sell drinks and snacks through their online stores. Sometimes they will take commercials of other products. That’s the way they turn online traffic into an offline economy.
Dragon Social understands that it can be very difficult to find a perfect KOL. When moving into a new market it takes a lot of time to begin to find out about the digital marketing strategies, not to mention the finding KOLs.
Dragon Social can do all of these and even more! If you would like to know more about what we can do for you, visit our services page!
Dragon Social stays are up-to-date with any trends in China social media marketing. Contact us or read more about marketing in China below!
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Fausto Tatarella
Congratulations!! My name is Fausto Tatarella, living in Beijing and taking care of communication of Slow Food International here in China. It would be a pleasure to know you and share some experiences
Fausto Tatarella
excellent