The Mangiabene Boys are a Montreal-based content-creating duo who primarily focus on all things gastronomy. With around 21 thousand followers on Instagram and 32 thousand followers on TikTok, both Alessandro and Micheal bring lifestyle and food content to their following. We recently had the chance to chat with the Mangiabene Boys to find out more about what they do and learn about their future plans as content creators.
What is your YouTube channel/Twitch stream/podcast/etc called and what is it about?
We are known as the Mangiabene Boys on all our platforms! Currently, our largest focus is on TikTok and Instagram. We also started a YouTube channel not too long ago, but we need to be more consistent on there. We’re all about food and lifestyle; we definitely focus a little more on food for example showcasing local businesses, highlighting our favorite restaurants and great spots to go out for a drink in city. We also try to diversify our content and include more lifestyle, travel and fashion content, as these are all different things that we love as well.
When did you start it? What motivated you at the beginning?
I (Alessandro) started the page back in 2018 and then asked my friend Michael to join during the pandemic, because he was already always helping me with creating content so that’s how it became The Mangiabene Boys. I think what motivated us from the beginning was just the fact that we love content creation and taking pictures/videos and just the whole creative aspect of social media.
Who were you inspired by? Any influences?
To be honest back when we started I feel like we were just creating content casually because we thought it would be fun not knowing that years later our page would grow to where it is today. We can’t recall if there were any specific influencers that inspired us to do this. We really just started posting for fun.
How would you describe your audience?
I think we can describe our audience as individuals who definitely know good food and want to find all the best spots to eat at (essentially a foodie-based audience).
What is your creative process? Do you have people who work with you?
Currently, it’s just the two of us doing all the content creation and account management. What we like to do is individually take content and share it with each other and try and come up with the best blend of both. Or sometimes we divide and conquer and each
takes on specific content creation tasks.
How do you monetize your content? Do you also have another job?
Sometimes we will reach out to brands that we want to collaborate with, but most of the time brands will reach out to us where we would partner on a campaign. When it comes to restaurants or local food collaborations, we do things a bit differently, depending on which deliverables they’re looking for and how many, we adjust our prices. We definitely understand some smaller businesses have less budget when it comes to hiring influencers/content creators, which we take into consideration. Yes, we both have other jobs as well, we actually work together in our content creation business where we have a handful of clients, and the company is called Nuovo Media Group Inc.
What is your favourite piece of content you have created?
Hmm, that’s a tough question, because we genuinely only put out content that we really like so everything on our page is true to our brand. Recently though we really liked our AYLA brunch video see here.
As well as our Jean Talon Market video where we review some of our favourite market eats, see here.
What is the best part about what you do? What is the worst part?
The best part about what we do is all the awesome opportunities that have come our way whether it’s really cool brands that we have worked with or restaurants that we got try and we also met some amazing creators that we get to call our friends now which is great. The downside is probably the fact that everything we post is open to criticism, so we do get some negative comments but I think that comes with social media.
What are your future plans for your channel?
We would love to just keep growing and seeing what happens, we definitely want to focus more on YouTube and grow that platform. In addition, we want to keep posting more diverse content (lifestyle, fashion, travel) and hopefully grow our audience. We also recently started a foundation called Share Your Plate with @NatachaEats, another fellow foodie. We are partnering with a local Montreal food bank to give back restaurant meals to its users. This is something we want to continue growing every year as well.
Where can we follow you?
You can follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook!
PAY IT FORWARD: What is another Canadian content creator that you love?
