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Remember when you had to buy a cookbook to find a recipe, not Pinterest search? Or when Mom showed you how to cook, not a YouTube video?

Where do you turn for recipes and dinner ideas? Brands such as Campbell's are leveraging social channels like Pinterest. — Where do you turn for recipes and dinner ideas? Brands such as Campbell’s are leveraging social channels like Pinterest.

The Hartman Group recently presented findings from ethnographic research of everyday life and food. A lot has changed. Dinner ideas now come from: 20% Pinterest, 18% Medical Professional, 25% Website and 89% own network of close friends.

Consumers now look to bloggers and social media networks for opinions to make food decisions. Point of purchase decisions can be influenced by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram news feeds on your phone. The study also reveals that most buying decisions about what to have for dinner happen two hours before mealtime. As a marketer you need to figure out ways to be in that social media news feed at the right time.

Other social media food insights include:

At least 2 out of 3 daily meals are now eaten alone; while online.
Most households who do eat together often eat different meals according to taste preferences.
First time online food shoppers first try buying groceries online because they took advantage of a Groupon offer.
Most use a phone while in the store to call or text home and ask the question: “what do you want to eat tonight?”

Food and beverages are also a foundation of community online. Other Hartman Group research talks of consumers using their imaginations through social media to learn about “a friend’s crepe technique or a blogger’s chai experience in Mumbai without leaving home.” Wherever they go virtually, the result is often a real trip to the grocery store. People consume much more social media content than they create. This is a real opportunity. So much of my work on food and beverage brands was to create content to remind consumers of the brand.

ADWEEK characterizes these trends as consumers, “… going back to their hunter-gatherer roots, but the bowls and stone knives are now blog posts and tweets.” Today, 52% of Facebook users have “liked” a food/beverage brand while 43% use social media to plan meals. The local-food movement is also feeding off increased social media use.

Local farmers like Massy Creek Farms are now profitable businesses selling sustainable food through social media marketing. A Facebook landing page and a fan base of 665 customers keeps them going with some social fans representing $500-a-week wholesale orders.

Social Food Communities are also springing up. Digital companies like Farmigo and Nextdoororganics enable collaborative consumption. Just because these efforts are local doesn’t mean they are small. Willard Bishop research estimates that fresh-food e-commerce will grow faster than all other grocery categories through 2017 outpacing discount clubs like Sam’s Club.

Restaurants use FarmersWeb to find premium producers while using social media for marketing to attract new customers. Christophe Hille, founder of a New York City restaurant says, “I am actually shocked by the responsiveness of Instagram users. “Every weekend, my pastry chef sends me a photo for brunch that I post on Instagram, and people on the app comment, ‘I will be there in 30 minutes’—and then they actually show up.”

If you are a food or beverage brand, are you leveraging social media? Have your marketing efforts caught up with consumer’s social media eating habits?

Upcycling isn’t just for crafts or Pinterest. It is simply a concept where old products are given more value. Upcycling in social media it is a way to optimize your time and effort.

Here are four ways you can reuse and repurpose for social media content:

1. Underutilized parts of your website. Are there valuable parts of your website that if you are honest with yourself no one really uses? Today people want content brought to them.

I used to work for a bank that had an excellent small business toolkit. It was valuable information from finance and HR to marketing tips. The problem was no one used it because they didn’t know it was there. How often do you surf your bank or other banks websites?

Our idea was to divide the long form website content into short chunks and push it out as small business tips on social media. Upcycling already created content to social can build awareness and drive traffic to the website, but it also helps build relationships in social media.

What valuable information is on your website or hidden in a brochure sitting on a shelf that you could repackage as valuable social media content?

2. Play By Play Of Live Events. Public Relations professionals have used events as a powerful publicity tool since the last century. Today you can multiply that power by bringing the event to many more than can attend in person.

For a regional airport client we planned a live contest where two local radio DJ’s flew to Chicago and back in one day. One took a flight from our local airport and the other took a flight from the farther big city airport. We demonstrated that you could save money, distance and time flying from our client’s airport when most people thought it was too expensive.

The airport received enormous buzz online as we updated Facebook, Twitter and UStream videos of each DJs progress. The event would have been successful with just the live reports on the radio, but Upcycling the live traditional media content to social media upped the awareness.

Do you have a live event coming up where you could up the exposure by reporting it on social media channels?

3. B-Roll Video And Photos. Producing a TV Commercial can take up to month and cost a lot of money. The average 30 second spot cost $350K. During a day long shoot you collect a lot of footage that doesn’t make the 30 second final cut.

Why not leverage extra footage as social content? A director’s cut, alternative version, or “making of” video can really draw fans. We all love to get a look behind the scenes. You could also share still photos online during the shoot via Instagram, Pinterst or another photo site for a sneak peak.

Either way you get more for your investment by upcycling video and photo content being produced for other uses. For more engagement you could even post different versions of the TV ad and have your fans vote on the final cut.

Do you have a TV or video shoot coming up that you can leverage as social media content? What about a still photo shoot?

4. Front Line Employees. Remember the small business tips for the bank example above? Our second idea was to empower branch managers to send out the small business tips via their LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook accounts as a way to generate leads for new accounts.

These managers were tasked with signing up new business accounts anyway. Why not give them another tool besides cold calls and post cards?

Unfortunately their response was that they blocked access to social media in the offices for employees. Some upcycling requires an open mind and may require some new guidelines such as an employee social media policy.

Is there a way you can upcycle your employees? Best Buy leverages their blue shirt in-store associates’ knowledge and down time to answer people’s tech questions on Twitter building awareness and goodwill for the brand.

Can you think of other ways to upcycle existing efforts into fresh social media content?