Food blogging might seem easy to an outsider. Still, anyone who’s taken hundreds of photos to get the perfect shot or rewritten an intro for the twelfth time knows it’s no cakewalk. There are many elements to making your posts successful. Overall, being one of the estimated 31.7 million bloggers in the US can make you feel like just another face in the crowd.
Fortunately, social media can help your food blog stand out. Social platforms are widely used, enabling you to reach new audiences and attract them to your site. By implementing the right tools and strategies on these sites, you could see major spikes in blog traffic.
This post will discuss the benefits of using social media marketing to gain more traffic to your food blog. Then we’ll provide a list of tools and tips that can help make it easier. Let’s get to work!
Why Is Social Media Important for Food Bloggers
Social media is similar to blogging in obvious ways, such as using visuals and written text to promote your content. Furthermore, an estimated 93 percent of internet users use social media, making it an essential tool in your marketing strategy.
Besides being a free way to reach your audience, social media is ideal for food blogging because of its focus on visuals. Blog posts, on the other hand, tend to be more text-heavy.
Since our brains process pictures faster than text, food blog marketing practices should maximize content that favors images over words:
It might feel overwhelming to dedicate extra time to social media marketing. However, there are ways to leverage tools and hone in on platforms to make the process easier. By being strategic, using social media can potentially pay off for your food blog.
How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Food Blog
There are numerous ways to grow traffic for your food blog – social media marketing should be at the top of this list. Here are four tips to help you get started!
1. Get Specific About Your Niche
Many food blogs cater to a specific audience. For example, the food blog Green Kitchen Stories targets vegetarians:
According to Faunalitics, two-thirds of vegetarians are female, and a third are male. These are the kind of statistics to consider when choosing which niche to target. This data can also inform which social media platform best suits your marketing efforts.
If you are strategic in choosing your platform, you could increase traffic to your site. For instance, 75 percent of people 18–24 use Instagram. Therefore, this could be your ideal platform if your target audience is within this age demographic.
On the other hand, people who use Pinterest (well-known for driving traffic back to blogs and sites) are almost 77 percent female.
Overall, this demographic data can help you make informed decisions. Therefore, we recommend doing some research to help you choose which social platform works best for you.
2. Use High-Quality Visuals
Although this tip may seem obvious, it’s vital to have top-notch images and videos for your blog promotion. According to BuzzSumo, blogs that utilize visuals every 75 to 100 words gain more shares.
The same rule applies to social media – Facebook posts with images or videos earn 2.3 times more engagement than those without. For this reason, many food bloggers use images in Facebook posts:
Be selective and deliberate in how you use your visuals. This approach can look like investing in a high-quality camera and learning the ins and outs of taking pictures for Instagram. Using creative angles, finding natural lighting, and choosing props that enhance the scene can help create appealing visuals for your social media posts.
3. Employ The Right Tools
Using dedicated tools can help you optimize your marketing strategy. Taking advantage of plugins can outsource work and free up your time so that you can focus on other aspects of your blog.
For example, an Instagram Widget plugin can display your Instagram feed directly on your website. It connects directly to your Instagram account and can display up to 12 posts on your site.
You can also try a Social Icons Widget plugin that displays social media icons profiles on your WordPress page. It can help your readers find your content across social platforms such as Instagram and Facebook:
These two plugins make it easier to display your social content. Therefore, you’ll have more energy to try new recipes or experiment with photography!
4. Make Sure to Post Regularly
If you’re a blogger, you might already know that regular posting is key to engaging with your audience. Pushing out content consistently also bumps your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results by increasing site indexing and page authority, among other benefits.
The same principle applies to social media. By posting videos and images regularly, you can increase your brand awareness and provide more opportunities to interact with your audience:
Though consistency is important, content creation can be time-consuming. You can limit burnout by valuing quality posts over quantity and choosing one or two platforms to focus your efforts on.
Conclusion
While maintaining a food blog is hard work, using social media to your advantage can boost page views and grow your audience. Over time, your newfound social marketing strategies can bring success to your food blog.
To recap, we recommend following these tips to promote your food blog on social media:
- Focus on your niche and strategically choose the right platform to promote content.
- Use eye-catching visuals by improving photography skills and investing in quality equipment.
- Utilize tools such as Instagram Widget and Social Icons Widget to promote your social media profiles and posts.
- Post regularly across social media platforms.
Do you have any questions about using social media to market your food blog? Let us know in the comments section below!
