Food Blogging FM 013:
Instagram For Food Bloggers Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com
Introduction Welcome to our thirteenth food blogging Podcast. In this food blogging Podcast I wanted to talk to you about Instagram and how you can build up your brand for your food blog on the social network. A lot of people just don’t get Instagram. They are put off by the fact that you can’t have your own clickable link in updates and don’t see it as having the same potential for making you money or building traffic than what Facebook or Pinterest have. But the truth is that Instagram can be amazing for both and compared with other social media is really easy to run. Plus it can nearly all be done by your phone which can be done while you’re watching TV or even on the train on the commute to work.
What should you do first? Okay so the first step with Instagram is like any other social media network is to get your account ready. You need your tagline, your website address, your logo. Please note – when you choose your website address go for your most recent posts link on your blog. Because people will be finding you via your most recent blog posts and also from recipes that are months old and if you just post the most recent recipe url it will confuse people! You also start off by finding 200 people to follow that you feel would influence you in your niche and that you would want to see in your feed. Many use this opportunity to follow celebrity chefs, food TV shows and some favourite food bloggers. We are recipethisblog on Instagram if you want to follow us!
The next thing you should be doing on your Instagram account is getting yourself familiar with #hashtags and understanding them. You want to have a list of hashtags that you can use and that those that are not huge ones so have a look around now and it will get you familiar with the system.
Your Blog Posts The next thing you want to do is post your old recipes onto your Instagram account. Get your recipe images made into 300 by 300 images and one by one gradually post them. If you have a lot of recipes to upload and share, say for example if your food blog is a year old, then start by doing 3 a day until you are caught up. Then when you are caught up you would simply load up your recipes as and when they happen. But there is also a certain layout that you want to achieve with the text. There is no good like with Facebook of just having the recipe title and the link because that is not what Instagram is about. Instagram is about telling a story through an image and hashtags as after all you don’t have a link. So start by naming your recipe and then describing the recipe. Then end by recommending people visit the link in your profile or give them your blog address as you still want to have people visiting your blog. Then you would go back through the text of your update and hashtag any keyword to do with food. So if you have used words like delicious, healthy, paleo, recipe, food, eat, bake or other similar words make sure they have been turned into a hashtag.
Then below where you have asked people to visit your website for the recipe add the rest of your hashtags. Over all between the top text and the bottom your hashtag count should be around 30. You don’t want to be putting out any updates with less than 10 hashtags because you just wont get the right attention for it. You also want to have a good mix of popular hashtags and then ones that are not so popular. Just think of like SEO and the way you always have a mix of broad keywords to long tail keywords. Look for keywords that have less than 250,000 photos and particularly ones that have 100,000 photos or less. The benefit of the smaller numbers is that when people search by tag six months from now they will still find you. For example one of the niches we are working on is Airfryer recipes and we use this a lot because we have a kitchen gadgets micro niche and themes about airfryer do very well both on social media and via SEO. When you use the #airfryer we will find about 60,000 images and often we will stay on the first 100 images for a good 2-3 weeks. However the hashtag #airfryerrecipes has just 126 photos and out of those 32 of them are mine. That means that people searching a year from now that have just bought an airfryer are going to find me. Of course it is luck to find one with so little photos and that a good one will always have less than 10,000. But what I find is that a lot of food bloggers use the same hashtags time after time. I use foodie and foodporn like everyone else, but these are not my only ones. To have foodporn the chances are your update will stay in the top 10 for a couple of seconds and that is not enough time for people to see you.
The best way I find it get a good mixture of likes and followers is to use words to describe your food. Include the main ingredients of your dish, how you cooked it, the texture and the taste and these will do much better. Another great option is to include brands with similar products to your recipe. So if you are doing an ice cream recipe you could include all your favourite ice cream brands such as Ben & Jerrys, Walls & Magnum. Also if you are targeting a diet such as Paleo or Whole30 then you can start typing out that hashtag and then the Instagram app will give you some extra ideas. At the end of the day it is all about practice and getting into a regular routine.
What else should you be doing? Not only should you be sharing your daily recipe to Instagram but you should also be working on your following and building up a brand. If you think that on Instagram advertisements from brands can earn you 5* as more you can see why so many food bloggers are making great money on there! I follow the same daily routine as far as other Instagram work is concerned: A) Follow 200 relevant people a day. Aim for targeting a hashtag in your niche or someone that is similar to yourself whose followers are similar to what you want. B) Like all the updates for one
particular keyword you’re targeting. These keywords are going to be your babies and you want people to think of you and associate you with those keywords. C) The same as B but commenting and liking the updates of the people that regular use these hashtags. This makes the person associate you with the keyword and starts the networking between you and them. D) Every week unfollow those that didn’t follow you back the week before. This keeps your following count from getting out of control and means you have a close ratio of followers to following. I use unfollowers.com for this and it’s really good for doing the job and you can simply target those that don’t follow you by the oldest first. E) Make sure your account is well maintained. That all your followers are followed back, that you reply to comments you receive and that you block spammers. You can also have great fun on Instagram and it can become part of everyday life. These steps are perfect for getting started on Instagram and building up your brand on there.
Our Podcast Sponsor For this fortnight our Podcast sponsor is Unfollowers. There are so many sites offering to help you with your unfollowers but this is the one that I have found to be the best value for money and offer you everything that you need. Unfollowers.com charges about $10 a month for two social media accounts and I use it for Twitter & Instagram. It is perfect for unfollowing on Twitter too and for quickly following back your new followers. It also carries a lot of useful information so you can decide whether
someone is worth following back or not. After all there are people that will follow you that have not been active in a long time and you don’t want to be following these people.
Food Blogging Q & A Each Podcast I pick a question that has been asked on one of the Facebook Groups and then answer it for you. For this session I was asked how the new Instagram update was going to damage their likes. What I have found is that people always target either just a couple of hashtags or they target ones with a high photo volume. This means that they get lost very quickly within Instagram. With the new rules on Instagram they need to be making sure that a lot of thought goes into hashtags so that people that are searching on Instagram will find them. Then when a photo takes off then you will have a better position on Instagram and the chance to go viral. I have been watching my own hashtags since the update and have not had any drop in likes or followers.
Well That’s A Wrap Thanks for joining us in our latest Podcast. We have really enjoyed talking about Instagram and how we have built up our first 7000 Instagram followers. We do well for likes and a lot of people find us via Instagram. We recommend that you download the transcript so that you access all the links mentioned and that you come back regularly to listen to our other food blogging podcasts.
Links & Resources Mentioned In This Podcast
Unfollowers Instagram Recipe This On Twitter Recipe This – Latest Blog Posts
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Thanks again for listening and best of luck with your food blog.
Samantha & Dominic Milner http://recipethis.com And don’t forget to connect with us on social media:
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