Whether it’s a creative hobby, a side hustle, or your full-time job, running a food blog can be a super rewarding way to feed your foodie passions! If you’re trying to earn a sufficient income from your food blog, you’re going to want to practice some basic marketing strategies that will help you reach wider audiences and get more organic traffic on your site.
Don’t worry — you don’t have to have a degree in marketing or even a ton of experience to successfully run social media pages for your food blog. With pre-made social media templates (such as these from MustHaveMenus), tons of helpful info online, and plenty of successful bloggers to glean inspiration from, all you’ve got to do is tap into your creativity, do some research, and get to posting! Here are some easy, effective ways to use social media to promote your food blog.
How to Get Started
1. Know Your Audience
For starters, it helps to understand your blog’s audience. If you’re just starting out with your food blog, you can create content centered around the type of audience you’d like to reach. If you’re already established, take a look at your website’s metrics and interactions to get a good feel for who really gels with what you’re creating.
Demographics, including gender, location, age, and education, are great places to start when honing in on your blog’s target audience. Understanding these demographics and what types of content they respond to will help you generate content on social media that will draw them in.
Moreover, within the foodie realm, try to settle into a distinct nice, whether you’re known for making vegan meals, healthy food, Asian dishes, indulgent or extravagant eats, easy recipes, dishes with exotic ingredients, affordable meals, or something totally unique. There’s probably a niche for whatever you’re making on food-forward social media, so that’s a great place to find your audience.
2. Choose Your Platform(s)
It doesn’t matter who your blog’s audience is — they’re definitely using social media. It’s no secret that most people use social media today, so one of the most effective ways to gain new exposure to your food blog is by sharing on the social media platforms that your target audience uses.
One of the most-used social media platforms, Instagram is a great place to start a social media page for your food blog. Use foodie-friendly hashtags, share high-quality photos of your dishes, post reels (videos) of your recipes, and even pepper in some lifestyle content that users might not get to see on your blog.
From reels to live videos to stories and more, there are lots of beneficial features on Instagram that can help you connect with your audience and help it grow.
TikTok
If taking videos isn’t your thing, you might want to skip over TikTok. However, if you can take some quality, on-brand videos of you creating some of your recipes, you can easily garner plenty of followers on TikTok, or should we say FoodTok?
YouTube
If taking videos is something you love to do, and especially if you love being on camera yourself, then YouTube could be a great place for you to find your niche. If you run a food blog with a partner or if you enjoy talking on camera, you could carve out a great space for yourself on YouTube.
Pinterest is one of the most-visited social media platforms for people searching for food recipes and eating inspiration. Reposting and linking your recipes on Pinterest with quality photos and graphics can be highly beneficial for your food blog!
Facebook has wonderful business features that will help you track social media metrics and grow your blog/business. You can share visuals and text-based posts on Facebook, and it’s a good place to have all of your business info readily available for viewers.
3. Establish Your Brand
Create a cohesive, identifiable brand that is totally unique to your brand by creating a social media page that portrays it.
With Visuals
Choose a color scheme that is distinctly branded and use those colors on posts with graphics or text, your logo, and even photo filters. Likewise, share photos of the food you make that is distinctive of your brand.
With Your Voice
The voice you use on your food blog should be the same one used on your social pages. Create an online persona that seamlessly carries over from your blog to your social activity, whether through your captions or videos. Your posting activity and social media style are also aspects of your brand voice that help you stand out in users’ minds.
Best Social Media Practices for Food Bloggers
1. Post Regularly
The best way to gather an audience and subsequently get users to want to interact with your content is to post often and consistently. You don’t want to overshare, but a consistent schedule of posting means that there will be plenty of opportunities for people to see your content and that they won’t forget about you.
We suggest using a scheduling tool like Hootesuite or Later to pre-schedule posts weeks or months into the future. This will help you build a solid social media strategy efficiently.
2. Don’t Forget to Connect Your Blog and Your Social Pages
Since your social media pages are used to promote your food blog, make sure that your blog is linked to your pages and is easily accessible to viewers. Put your website link in your social media bios and link directly to website pages when you share stories!
Likewise, you can install a plugin on your food blog that shows your social feed directly on your website. Whether you choose to link your Instagram, Facebook, or other social site, visitors of your blog can see your colorful posts and navigate to your social media pages while viewing your blog.
3. Engage With Your Audience
Connecting with your audience is the best way to gain and retain followers on social media. Not only should you post relatable content that your audience will want to interact with, but you can directly engage with followers by commenting on their posts, replying to their comments, or resharing their content.
Use Your Social Media Strategy to Grow Your Blog
Take your food blog and reform it on your social media pages. Think of social media as a place to share the best tidbits of your blog, plus exclusive content that might not have a place on the blog itself. Get creative, start to strategize, and track your metrics and growth to begin to build a foolproof social media plan that will help boost your food blog.