Who's the daddy on Twitter chef?

This week we’ve seen the much lauded return of Food & Drink to the BBC with the wonderfully amenable Michel Roux Jr taking the helm as presenter and Tom Kerridge rocking up for the first star guest turn. 

As well as being a highly popular first time guest on the show, Tom has also become quite the rising star on Twitter.   At times provocative, but always passionate about food, Tom has many qualities that make for a great Twitter presence.   Seeing Tom on the telly got me wondering how his performance on Twitter now measures against some of his fellow chefs.  For this blog post, I thought I’d do an analysis to see how his stats compared to two of the country’s other leading two star Michelin chefs, housewife’s favourite Raymond Blanc and Saturday Kitchen regular Michael Caines.

Despite being on Twitter for less than a year, Tom’s already hitting an incredibly high Engagement Rating of 91% in comparison to Raymond (27%) and Michael (73%).   Tom’s overall influence rating is higher too at 66, against Raymond with 62 and Michael with 53.  

Tom’s doing a fantastic job at picking up new followers, as the stats show he’s winning 51 new followers a day on average in comparison to 20 for Raymond and 29 for Michael.

Chef

Influence Rating

Engagement Rating

New Followers/Day

Tom Kerridge

66

91%

51

Raymond Blanc

62

27%

20

Michael Caines

53

73%

29

So what’s the secret behind Tom’s Twitter success? 

For a start, he sends out about 50 tweets on average per week which is at least twice as many tweets a week as the other two chefs over the same averaged out period.  About 15% of his tweets are RT’s which is really good practice if you want to improve your social engagement rating on the channel.   He also mentions others in his tweets nearly 76% of the time.  That indicates that he’s using Twitter in a highly social manner.   People love nothing more than to be mentioned on Twitter.  They say the sweetest sound is the sound of our own name, and that certainly rings true on social media.   Tom’s definitely got the gist of this and is very generous in sharing his Twitter love.  He shares plenty of banter and positive cheer with chefs and customers alike.  He majors more on food photos than the other two as well which is always a good policy when you’re famous for your grub.  All three chefs are great at chatting and sharing sneak peeks from behind the scenes.  But it seems Tom does it more consistently, at a high quality and at greater volume than his fellow chefs.  As a result, he’s growing his fan base twice as fast.  So well done Tom on doing a fantastic job on social media.  As they say in Ireland, more power to your elbow and may your pots never run dry!