McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell, Subway and Domino's are among the 66 restaurant brands in this catalogue, and this page counts the public Instagram posts that name each of them. The counts are read from the database when the page loads, so they are current rather than typed once.
Generated, not written. Every figure below is a count of rows. Nothing is estimated, modelled, weighted or filled in from an industry average. A brand we have collected nothing for is missing from the table rather than shown as zero.
What gets posted about 37 restaurant chains
We found 740 public posts across 37 of the 66 brands, over a trailing 30 day window. That is a sample of what was posted, so compare the brands rather than quote the totals.
| # | Brand | Posts found naming it (30d) | Followers | Engagement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tim Hortons | 95 | 627K | — |
| 2 | Krispy Kreme | 37 | 2.1M | — |
| 3 | Starbucks | 32 | 17.6M | — |
| 4 | Pierre Herme | 32 | 1M | — |
| 5 | Alfred | 31 | 145K | — |
| 6 | Blue Bottle Coffee | 26 | 519K | — |
| 7 | Wingstop | 24 | 809K | — |
| 8 | KFC | 23 | 2.1M | — |
| 9 | Popeyes | 23 | 594K | — |
| 10 | Chipotle | 22 | 1.9M | — |
| 11 | Raising Cane's | 22 | 1.9M | — |
| 12 | Shake Shack | 22 | 931K | — |
| 13 | Caffè Nero | 22 | 2.3K | — |
| 14 | McDonald's | 20 | 5.7M | — |
| 15 | Blank Street | 20 | 212K | — |
| 16 | Laduree | 20 | 4K | — |
| 17 | Panera Bread | 19 | 611K | — |
| 18 | Naya | 19 | 24.5K | — |
| 19 | Costa Coffee | 18 | 453K | — |
| 20 | Fore Coffee | 18 | 422K | — |
| 21 | Manner | 18 | 402K | — |
| 22 | PopUp Bagels | 18 | 384K | — |
| 23 | Third Wave Coffee | 18 | 168K | — |
| 24 | Just Salad | 16 | 80.8K | — |
| 25 | Ess-a-Bagel | 16 | 41.9K | — |
| 26 | Jeni's | 14 | 545K | — |
| 27 | Russ & Daughters | 12 | 252K | — |
| 28 | Kee Wah Bakery | 12 | 11.7K | — |
| 29 | Chopt | 11 | 129K | — |
| 30 | Black Seed Bagels | 11 | 91.5K | — |
| 31 | Tompkins Square Bagels | 11 | 39K | — |
| 32 | Jollibee | 10 | 566K | — |
| 33 | Salt & Straw | 10 | 514K | — |
| 34 | The Brown Cow | 10 | 2.9K | — |
| 35 | Jersey Mike's | 4 | 364K | — |
| 36 | In-N-Out | 2 | 1.1M | — |
| 37 | Caribou Coffee | 2 | 143K | — |
An em dash means we have not measured that value yet.
What the posts are about, and how they read
Each post is labelled with one subject and one tone by a language model, one post at a time. The model emits no figures: every number here is a count of labels.
| Brand | Labelled | Most common subject | Positive | Critical |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blue Bottle Coffee | 10 | passing | 1 | 1 |
How this was collected
Posts are found by searching for the brand name as a hashtag with the spaces removed, by reading the brand's public tagged tab, and for brands with a two word name by searching that phrase as plain caption text. Each post is stored once, with the date it was published and the method that found it.
How broadly a brand is searched depends on how much attention it gets here. The most read brands get all of those methods on a weekly sweep; the least read get the hashtag and the tagged tab, less often; a brand nobody has opened is not collected at all. Brands somebody is paying to monitor are shown publicly 14 days behind, so this table ranks on what has been measured rather than on who is freshest.
What this cannot tell you
The sample is chosen by attention, not by rule. A brand people read about here is searched far more often than one nobody opens, so the counts are a lower bound on what exists rather than an estimate of it. A gap between two brands in the table is partly a gap in how often we looked. Anybody comparing brands should treat that as the first problem rather than a caveat.
Owned and earned posts are counted together. A chain posting on its own account is found by the same search that finds a customer, and this page does not separate them. For a marketing exposure question that distinction is the whole question.
There is no location on a post. We store nothing about where the account that posted is, which rules out every geographic question this data looks like it could answer.
A hashtag search is not a census. Instagram returns what it returns, private accounts are invisible, and a post that misspells the brand is a post we never see.
The brands themselves
Every brand above has a page with its own figures, the posts we caught naming it, and the peers it is ranked against. All 66 restaurant brands →
Nearby cuts of the same catalogue: fast food, coffee shops, soda, and brands built for an audience under thirty.