Weekly Food Blog Update #2: Social Media and How to Get Followers for Your Food Blog
Now you have tackled finding hosting, a domain name, and setting up your WordPress food blog or website. What is the next most important thing you need to do? Setting up social media accounts for your food blog and gain followers. In order to make any money with your blog, you need to have readers! So how do you get out into the crowded spaces of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest and make yourself known? In this post, I will go over how to set up social media accounts and get followers for your food blog. Social media is an animal of its own, so let this post be a general guide and look for for tips on the individual social media sites to come later.
Before we jump in, let me first make one thing clear. Never pay companies to get your followers on social media, or use follow circles. I have ashamedly tried this with a previous business, and felt like I had 0 followers instead of 1,000. Nobody was engaged in any of my posts, and nobody actually liked my content. Everybody who uses these devices are only looking for superficial numbers, and social media sites catch on quickly and can ban you for gaining followers too quickly the wrong way! Let me go over the real way to gain followers on social media, and I promise you will be much better off. It is not instantly gratifying like using bots or follow circles, and takes more work, but in the end you will have real followers with real engagements.
Now that we’ve talked about the incorrect ways to get followers, let’s go over the best practices to get followers. Don’t forget to link your social media pages back to your website both ways!
Step 1: Set up all social media accounts
The first thing you need to do is visit all of the most popular social media sites and set up an account for your food blog. Do you use your personal account or start from scratch? Well, there are pros and cons to both. If you use your personal account, you already have a following and can grow from there. However, you may find it hard to mix posts about your food blog or website with personal posts, and you may lose followers who are not interested in one or the other. On the other hand, your followers may like to “get to know the real you” better if you have a mixed account.
If you start from scratch, you can easily invite your friends and family to follow you if you want, and give that account the focus and attention your work deserves without taking away from it with personal posts.
The decision is yours, but have no fear, the principles of gaining followers remain the same either way.
Take the time and create a good bio, because social media sites have algorithms that look for keywords to show your page in “suggested pages” fields, etc.
Step 2: Invite your friends and family to support your pages!
The easiest followers you can get are your friends and family, and followers you may already have on your personal accounts. Send them an invite AND a personal message explaining you have started a new food blog or website and asking them to follow you. Make is short and sweet.
Step 3: Put yourself out there using hashtags
Hashtags are keywords people search for or click on in posts to find other similar posts. Research successful pages similar to yours and see what hashtags they use for their posts, and use them for every post so that people can find you more easily!
Step 4 (optional): Pay social media companies to “boost” your posts
In the early days, it was easy to gain a lot of followers through hashtags and engagements alone. Now they are very crowded spaces, and those ways are not as effective. If you really want many viewers for your content and potentially many more followers, you have to pay to boost or promote your content. You can do this in a few different ways: promoting individual posts, promoting your page, or buying advertisement.
Step 5: Research the best days and times to post for each social media site
Take the time to research what days and times are best for social media posts, and schedule or post your content at these times for more views and engagements.
Step 6: Consistency is key
To gain and maintain followers on your social media accounts, it is imperative you post regularly. If this is too hard for you, schedule posts in advance. Not only can you schedule your WordPress posts, you can also schedule social media posts too. You can spend one day a week for a few hours setting up posts that will happen later in the week when you are working, spending time with the kids, etc. The key is to keep your content fresh and regular!
Step 7: Go Live
Create an IGTV (Instagram TV) channel or use Facebook Live to give your followers a little bit more, and find new followers at the same time. People can browse channels, and you want yours to be in there for them to find! If you have a food blog, it doesn’t have to be long sessions of recipe making (although it totally can be). You can also do little how-tos, tips or tricks every now and then.
Step 8: Get promoted by other influencers
Find pages with a lot of followers and message them for collaborations – if you have great content, they may be willing to share with their following! Sometimes there are pages on social media who ONLY share other pages’ content, so use their hashtag and get shared!
Every Friday I publish a blog update which provides insight on how to start and maintain a food blog, and turn it into a business. Check back weekly for new tips!
