Riding The Instagram Wave

 

As those of you who have followed me for a period of time know, I am not a traditional foodie as I don't talk about Chinese food per se on a micro level, but rather more on a macro level with Chinese food being discussed in a historical and cultural context and in the environment we live in.  The reason is that I began my amateur writing career some 50 years ago not about food, but about the history and culture of Chinese Americans.  My interest in Chinese food developed much later, although borne of my interest in Chinese-American studies.

Even as I was eating at thousands of different Chinese restaurants over the decades, I did not take pictures of my meals.  Even when I started reporting what Chinese food I was eating back in 2009 when I joined Twitter, I was only posting descriptions, not pictures of the food, and even despite the complaints of Twitter followers who wanted to see what I was eating.  It was only in 2016 when the complaints about no pictures got louder, and my old smartphone which had a inferior camera broke down, that I bought a new phone capable of taking pictures worth posting on Instagram.

When I started on Instagram it was only with a few dozen followers who knew of me from Twitter.  Occasional mentions in various media articles enticed the more curious observers to seek out my Instagram account, such that in three years I had accumulated 500 followers.  Not as many as the 1,500 or so Twitter followers I had built up over 10 years, but still a number I considered impressive since I was making no effort to increase my follower base.  

However things were about to quickly change.  Clarissa Wei, who first introduced me to the world in 2012 as the crazy lawyer who had eaten at over 6,000 Chinese restaurants, had moved on to be a senior editor at Goldthread 2, the video arm of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post.  Two years ago Clarissa was coming from Hong Kong to do some video interviews in the Los Angeles area, and she thought it would be fun to do an update on my eating adventures and present them to a more international audience (although her 2012 profile of me certainly did spread to the four corners of the world).  So we spent a day touring San Gabriel Valley dining spots, and two months later Goldthread released her 10 minute video interview with me.  BOOM!  Not that there was a link or anything to my Instagram account, but new followers started appearing out of the woodwork.  In two weeks time I had added 1,000 new followers, pushing me up to 1,500 followers.

After that things settled down.  Basically my experience with Instagram paralleled that which I had with Twitter, meaning on a daily basis new followers and unfollowers cancelled out each other, but whenever I received some kind of media attention there would be a corresponding increase in followers.  Doing regular self-Googles would pinpoint the triggering event for an increase in Instagram followers.  However with the onset of the pandemic, I pretty much hit the sidelines as food writing and other media attention as traditional food writing topics became irrelevant and/or unimportant.  But a couple of times during 2020 there were surges in my follower base.  With no current publicity coming to my attention I was puzzled.  So I decided to contact a few new followers asking how they managed to find my Instagram account.  The answer turned out that Clarissa's Goldthread video was being rediscovered over and over on different Facebook groups, such as Subtle Asian Traits, Asians Never Die and San Gabriel Valley eats.  So that explained the total number of new followers despite the apparent lack of any new exposure, pushing the total of Instagram followers early this year to about 2,300.

By then most of the members of the Facebook groups were already aware of the Goldthread video, so I expected things to revert to stability.  But after a brief pause, there was another a new surge of followers.  Again I was puzzled, and with unproductive Google searches I once again turned to polling new followers.   The first response was "Oh I saw the video on YouTube."  Well, the video was posted to YouTube back in 2019, but it had only garnered 40,000 views in two years, mostly when the video was first posted, with most viewers catching the video on Facebook, where there had been nearly 800,000 views.  But then I noticed the YouTube count for the video started going wild, jumping by 4,000 to 5,000 views every day.  Refining my inquiry of new followers, I found that the new followers were watching Chinese food videos on autoplay and that my interview just happened to show up.  So being part of a YouTube autoplay rotation I was gaining a hundred new followers on some days.  The number of new views on YouTube have settled down to perhaps a 1,000 a day now, bringing the YouTube cumulative views up to 250,000.  My Instagram follower count is now 3,400, with another 100 followers coming on board every two to three weeks.  All this is amazing since the new followers have to take it upon themselves to find where my Instagram page is.

This and other episodes have given me an interesting insight on how the internet works, one you can't learn just by reading books or even the internet itself.