Food Blogging FM 008 Social Media Starting Points

Food Blogging FM 008:

Social Media Starting Points Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com

Introduction Welcome to our eighth food blogging Podcast.

Today I want to talk to you about social media. It shocks me that a lot of food bloggers don’t bother with social media at all or do it in an unorganised manner.

I often hear the line “I don’t have the time” or the most frequent one “I am focusing on one social media at a time”.

These are the same food blogs that are two years old, have had irregular posting schedules and have little or no social media completed.

It doesn’t have to be like that though as social media is a lot easier than you think and you can start with a bare minimum on each social media channel and then gradually build it up via the different channels as you build up your confidence and develop a sense of rhythm.

Or if time is a problem there is always the opportunity to outsource part of it so that you can focus on recipe development and other types of traffic.

So let me show you what the bare minimum should look like:

Latest Blog Posts If you are really lacking in time and you have just 10 minutes to give to your social media then I would highly recommend just having your accounts in place to do daily blog posting.

Though don’t use these rubbish automation tools – actually do it yourself.

Post your recipe to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, Instagram and Pinterest.

If you think that some of those channels don’t count, remember they are either building up your brand or they are building SEO backlinks or traffic to your site. Either way they ALL play an important role in the future of your food blog.

But let’s look at them all in more detail. This especially applies if you can either outsource or dedicate 45 minutes a day to social media as it will really kick off your traffic.

You need to be consistent, you need to always be there and you need to be specific to your micro niche.

Twitter Twitter seems to have a love and a hate relationship among food bloggers. Some people worship the site and others hate it and the fact that it is often not your biggest traffic source you can see why people are put off by it.

After having a look at my traffic results from 5 full months of food blogging it stands at 507 visitors. Compare this to 6490 from Facebook, and 2463 from Pinterest you can see why it puts some people off.

But out of the social media channels Twitter is the best one for getting social shares, connecting with brands and getting people engaged with your content.

There are no groups to sign up for, no hidden agendas and it is just a case of getting your point across in 140 characters or less.

I am one of the many that loves Twitter but maybe that is because it gave me my big break. Back in 2009 when Twitter was just taking off I released an ebook showing people how to grow their business on Twitter. At the time I had 60,000 genuine followers and my ebook made

six figures. There are many people that bought that ebook that have followed my blogging and internet marketing journey to this day.

But what I love from Twitter (away from sentimental value) is how easy it is. You can have it bringing you good quality backlinks. After all remember that each time someone retweets your content you are creating a backlink.

I estimate that running Twitter takes me and my outsourcing team less than 15 minutes per day so it’s an easy starting point.

If you’re starting out what I recommend is that you:

A) B)

C) D)

E)

F)

G)

Share your blog posts as they happen. If it is a recipe then attach the best recipe photo. This puts it in people’s faces and gets their attention and is more likely to get you a retweet.

General daily update. This gets people connected with you and keeps your account active.

Ask for a retweet a week later. Share the same recipe again a week later and at the end ask for a retweet. You may think this is really cheeky but people will retweet if they like your content. This often doubles my retweets for each of my recipes.

Thank people. Each Tuesday morning at 8am the people that retweeted me the week before will get a quick thank you.

Take part in Follow Friday each Friday. This is a community thing that got going in 2009 and is where you thank people that you have communicated with on Twitter during a particular week.

Fill in the blank. This is a popular way to get people talking. As them a question where they have to finish the sentence. Such as My favourite low carb food is _____________?

Follow related people each day. My virtual assistant follows 300 people for me a day based on keywords and following people with a similar site to my own.

Thank people for following. A pretty graphic and a quick thanks is a great way to thank new followers.

And that is it. Twitter is of course built on simplicity and that is all you have to do. A and B on the list above is what I do, C-F is what my writer does and G and H is what my virtual assistant does. My personal work level is just 5 minutes a day.

Facebook Onto Facebook otherwise known as my highest traffic source within social media. I believe this very much applies to the food niche and have found in other niches it has never been as successful.

So if you’re a food blogger then get yourself on Facebook as soon as possible.

But what do you need to do on there?

Well firstly your role is going to be the same as Twitter. You want social engagement, followers, traffic and a way to get your social sharing moving.

Ideally you want a business page running off a personal account. Keep the personal account for business, so no sharing content from family members and use it for connecting with your business friends on Facebook and build up your account gradually.

The biggest benefit of this is that you can invite your friends to like your page and share your content and they are more likely to do this if they feel like they already have a connection with you.

Here are the specifics of what you should be doing: A) Your blog posts. Every time you post a blog post to your blog then you should also share it on Facebook.

B) Share other peoples content on a regular basis.

C) Have a timetable where you post to your Facebook account with content that gets the conversation going rather than just your blog posts.

D) Fill in the blank. Just like Twitter this also goes out on Facebook.

E) Extra promotions of your content so that people remember it!

F) Like 10 pages a day and then post to the page introducing yourself.

G) Invite your friends to your Facebook page. Do this once a week for any that has not been invited to keep it moving.

H) Keep your account up to date. On your personal account you want to be following back new friends, sending friend requests to those that you are connected with, From this list I do A-C, my writer does D & E and my virtual assistant does the rest.

Just think this is an easy list. It is not a hard amount of work involved and this has led to us getting 1000 likes in our first five months and more than 1200 visitors a month.

You will also notice there is no Facebook Group work here and that you don’t have to post to your page hourly or mass share content for the traffic to come along!

Pinterest I am sure the first social media account you have opened for your site has been Pinterest. Until they started the promoted pins they were the top social media site for traffic. But since then (people like me) that live outside the US are not allowed to pay for pins so we are left to work harder on our traffic.

Use my old site as an example. It was established on Pinterest from as early as 2013. It had built traffic up for a long time. It has 6000 followers which happens to be 3 times more than Recipe This. But it gets 10 times the traffic if not more.

So clearly in 2016 you have to work harder on your Pinterest traffic than you used to!

So where do you start.

Well here is my hit list for Pinterest: A) Post every graphic from every blog post. If you are not on there yet, get this brought up to date, if you are do it as it happens. With all the “pin it” buttons out there this is a rather fast job.

B) Follow people. Our account follows 200 people a day and then also follows back new followers.

C) Post content to groups. You need to be on these groups and they can bring you a lot of traffic. Just think these groups have lots of followers so it is like starting out with followers. Aim for posting 50 pins a day via the groups you’re a member of. You want to be on at least 30 boards and build it up as much as you can.

D) Post other peoples content. You don’t want to come across as in it just for yourself. Aim to post at least 10 pins a day that is NOT your own content. Those that you share the majority will share back.

That might seem like a lot but only the posting from the site is me.

Everything else is via my wonderful virtual assistant.

Instagram There is a lot of debate over Instagram.

It doesn’t bring me enough traffic, it isn’t easy to check how much traffic it has brought me and the list goes on and on.

So why am I on Instagram?

Well it is really good with engagement and the traffic is not as bad as you would think it was. I get a lot of searches for my site that people have searched for after finding me on Instagram. It is also a great place to connect with brands and I have had the most sign ups for my mailing list from Instagram.

So before you throw it to the trash, give it a second chance. And seriously 10 minutes a day in an evening while watching TV is all it takes to run it!

The first thing you need to focus on is to make sure that your posts are going out on there. I will copy and paste the text to Dominic on a private message on Facebook and then he will copy and paste it in during the evening.

I keep it as I do with Facebook just with more hashtags. Oh and you’ll always see that famous line in my updates: If you would like to read this post please go to the live link in my profile or go to recipethis.com.

The reason?

Well you can’t have a live link in your updates, but you can in your profile. But the live link you get in your profile is just one link for all posts, so it is better to have the link of your recent posts so that people can find your content quickly. Don’t update it each time you post as many people will be accessing one of your old recipes and this will irritate them a LOT! The emphasis on Instagram is a lot of hashtags so don’t be shy with them if you want to see results. On a new account with good hashtags you can expect (at least) 30 likes and with 5000 followers it will increase to between 80-120.

With the hashtags don’t just go for food porn just because everyone else is. Yes I do use it, but I use other ones too. If you have a low carb recipe target the low carb diets and general keywords. If it is meat, say which meat is in it and be descriptive just like you would with a submission onto FoodGawker.

Apart from loading up your blog posts you also need to be:

A) Liking related content. We always like the content of key phrases and words each month so that it is inline with our theme. So for May it is all about frugal cooking so all the frugal keywords will be getting our love.

B) Following daily. We follow 200 people a day and then unfollow those that don’t follow us back after a few days.

C) Thank new followers. We thank our new followers with a direct message a couple of days after they’ve followed us.

D) Like & comment – We also comment on things that are niche specific so that we are increasing our audience.

All of the points above are run from a virtual assistant and we just load up the post and reply to comments that we receive.

Google+ And Linkedin Let’s talk about the social media sites that nobody cares about. Let’s face it they are loved as much as Myspace or before that Friends Reunited. If you have been on the internet for any length of time I am sure you’ll remember them.

Actually MySpace was the first social media site that I promoted my first website on and that is going back a while…..

Well anyway, Google+ and Linkedin are never going to make your site.

They will never give you that 10,000 page views day or that amazing mass sharing exposure.

But shall I tell you what they can do?

Well they can help your SEO positions and getting the word out about your site. I have found that any blog posts that have had more than 5 shares on Google Plus have gone to the front page of Google and stayed there. They are perfect SEO as you would say!

Then if you add to this that Google takes Google links seriously first, then you have something don’t you?

But Google have openly said that they are not putting any further effort into Google+ and that they will eventually phase it out.

As for LinkedIn it has never been my favourite place in the world. I have found more cyberbullying on there than anywhere else online. In my days when I had a diet blog everyone was horrible to each other and would be basically bashing how we each did things.

I even remember someone saying my site was rubbish that they had never visited and they had still not built their own.

So I try not to get too involved on there.

The secret is to copy what you do on Facebook onto these social media sites. Each time you load up a recipe, a regular blog post or get the conversation going that it will be copied over onto here.

It will then help you get shares on the sites without being too involved.

There are of course groups on both Google+ and Linkedin but we find that they are not worth the effort and in the long term they really don’t bring you that much back.

We have done groups on both of them but the traffic levels were nowhere near what you expect from Pinterest & Facebook.

Our Podcast Sponsor For this week our Podcast sponsor is Hootsuite, And many of you will be thinking “not them again” but yes they are back!

Hootsuite is as automated as my social media gets. Forget all the other ones, this is cheap and it does a fantastic job. I can’t remember when I started with it, but it is registered under my business that I sold in 2014 so I must have had it a while!

It basically allows you to schedule posts and post to several social media accounts at once.

My schedule will work as follows: 1) I will visit my blog and pin my images for Pinterest 2) Go into Hootsuite and Tweet my new post 3) Create another message that will go out to Facebook, Linkedin and Google+ at the same time.

4) I will copy and paste the message for Facebook to Dominic and add hashtags so that he can do Instagram later.

All this takes me less than 6 minutes per post and without Hootsuite it would be a nightmare. I would have to log into each account and also I have to worry about my VA having my account flagged because she has logged in from a suspicious location.

Well anyway you can find http://recipethis.com/hootsuite.

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Oh and we pay for it yearly which is just under $100.

So if you are limited on time, just make sure you get out your daily posts each day and then work on other jobs when you have the time.

Social Media Plugins To Run Your Account So you have to expect to need some social media tools to make things happen. You know the sort I am talking about. The pin it button on your site, the share buttons and such like. They all matter and they all get people sharing your content from your website.

The ones I would personally recommend are:

Simple Social Media Plugin - This is what we use at the bottom of our posts to encourage social media sharing from the main social media channels. Don’t use the Sumo Me button for all these channels because it doesn’t work on tablets and with more than half of food readers being on handheld devices you could ruin their viewing experience. Though you can use Sumo Me if you limit it to 2 social media channels like we do.

Pinterest Pin It – This is so that people can quickly pin your content to their social media accounts. There are a lot of ones that are very intrusive but you struggle to get rid of them when you are visiting on a mobile and ruin the reader experience.

We also recommend that down your side bar you have a few social icons to entice people to follow your activity on social media.

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 to important likes were and what post reach was.

Well post reach is how many people have the potential to see your content. So how many times you are landing in someone’s feed and this is basically saying how engaged your content is with the reader.

The most important thing to learn is that your reach should be higher than your actual likes.

You could have a million likes but they are useless if you have just 10,000 reach because this would mean that only 1% of your page fans actually see your content.

For this reason likes are not the main focus here, but by having daily engagement on your content will build up your traffic and your brand much quicker.

From a money point of view advertisers wont touch you if you have 100 likes so aim for 1000 and then work on your post reach.

Well That’s A Wrap Thanks for joining us in our latest Podcast.

We have built up a following of over 13,000 in five months and we very much practice what we preach and what you see in this Podcast we personally do.

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             

Hootsuite Our latest blog posts Sumo Me Simple Social Media Plugin Pinterest Pin It Twitter Facebook Google Plus Instagram Pinterest Linkedin Tumblr Yummly

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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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