An Essential Guide to Food Blogging for Beginners

Learn how to conveniently use social media platforms to boost page views and grow an organic audience for your food blog.

Social media is the best and easiest way to reach your audience. It is the ideal platform to enhance food blogging for beginners because of its focus on visuals, as blog posts, on the other hand, tend to be more text-heavy. According to research, approximately 93 percent of internet users use social media, making it an essential tool in your marketing strategy. You will agree with me that our brains process pictures faster than text; therefore, food blog marketing practices should maximize content that favors images over words.

How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Food Blog

You can use several platforms to promote your food blog, but social media marketing is always at the top of the list. Here are four tips to help you grow traffic as a food blogger:

Get Specific About Your Niche

If you are having trouble choosing a niche or target audience, I suggest you focus on vegetarians and women because two-thirds of vegetarians are female, and a third are male. Also, recent research shows that people who use Pinterest (a platform well-known for driving traffic back to blogs and sites) are almost 77 percent female. We can both agree that women on social media are more interested in food than men.

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Also, 75 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 30 use Instagram and Facebook. Therefore, this could be your ideal platform since your target audience is within this age demographic. These platforms encourage food blogging for beginners. However, I’ll recommend you do some research to help you choose which social platform works best for you.

Use High-Quality Visuals.

To gain an audience that will actively engage with your blog posts, it’s important to have top-notch images and videos for every virtual promotion. You can start by investing in high-quality cameras and learning the ins and outs of taking pictures for social media using creative angles, natural lighting, and props that will enhance the scenes.

As a food blogger, you must be selective and deliberate in using your visuals because social media posts with high-quality images or videos earn 2.3 times more engagement than those with blurry images or videos.

Employ The Right Tools

Try to take advantage of plugins to optimize your marketing strategy. These plugins can outsource work and free up your time so that you can focus on other aspects of your blog.

Plugins like Instagram Widget can display your Instagram feed directly on your website. It will connect directly to your Instagram account and display up to 12 posts on your blog.

Also, a Social Icons Widget plugin displays social media icon profiles on your WordPress page. You can check for another plugin that enhances food blogging for beginners.

Make Sure to Post Regularly

As a blogger, you might already know that regular posting is the key to engaging with your audience. When you consistently push your content, it will impact your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results by increasing site indexing and page authority, among other benefits.

This principle is also applicable to all social media platforms. When you engage your audience by posting videos and images regularly, you tend to increase your brand awareness and create more opportunities to interact with your followers.

Social Media Platforms You Can Use To Promote Your Food Blog

Pinterest

This platform started as a way for people to save and share inspirational images, but today it has become one of the best places to find recipes. Interestingly, about 50–60% of Pinners use the platform to find food and drink ideas, so hurry and join other food bloggers who use Pinterest as a major traffic driver in their growth strategies.

Pinterest is used for:

• Driving traffic back to your blog
• Expanding your audience reach
• Pins also have high click-through rates.

Instagram

Since its launch in 2010, the platform has 112.5 million users. Instagram is a social media platform for sharing photos and videos in different forms. Like in a curated feed of your favorite accounts, in short-form videos called Stories, and in longer-form videos, you can share live or via Reels.

Instagram is used for:

• Building brand awareness
• Connecting with brands and sponsors
• Connecting with a younger audience
• Working on sponsored campaigns

Facebook

As a food blogger, you can explore your audience-building potential on Facebook, with its 2.7 billion users. You can have a standalone page for your blog to share posts, photos, videos, and/or memes.

Facebook has a larger audience; the fastest-growing audience is between the ages of 55 and 65. So, if your content or recipes appeal to an older audience, you should build a Facebook strategy for your brand.

Facebook is used for:

• Driving traffic back to your website
• Gain high click-through rates.
• Interact with a large audience

TikTok

As you know, TikTok is purely for short, snappy, quick, entertaining, and easy-to-watch videos. Although TikTok videos are comedic, trendy, and viral in nature, they can also be used for food and recipe promotion in a fun, quick, and interesting way. This social media platform is the newest on our list, but it already has over 800 million users, populated by young people between the ages of 18 and 25.

TikTok is used for:

• Building an audience
• Reaching a younger audience
• Showcasing your personality
• Driving some traffic back to your site

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing platform owned and operated by Google with about 2 billion users. This platform has also supported food blogging for beginners. It is a great place to show off your on-camera personality and cooking skills. YouTube has a massive audience comprising both young and older users. This platform also allows you to post full-length videos on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

YouTube is used for

• Building an audience
• Leveraging your audience into sponsorships and/or ad revenue
• Showing off your personality and building a relationship with your audience
• Longer content like vlogs, cooking, and hosted recipe videos

Twitter

Typically, Twitter does not generate a lot of traffic (unless a post goes viral), and it has fallen to the wayside for many food bloggers since most people use the platform for things like politics, comedy, or news. However, if you have a short and sweet update about your recipe you want to share with your audience, Twitter might be a good place for it.

Twitter is used for:

• Building a personal brand
• Reaching your audience with short, succinct updates
• to push content out to reach another audience

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is typically focused on networking and career advancement. It has about 500 million users, comprising older men and women pursuing a professional career.

That said, if you have a professional niche, podcast, or event that can help LinkedIn’s audience, feel free to spend some time promoting your content there.

LinkedIn is used for:

• Promoting educational content, workshops, podcasts, or anything career-focused
• Networking and linking up with business partners
• Promoting content

Conclusion

Food blogging for beginners is mostly about exploring every social platform available to capture people’s attention confidently. As a blogger, always make sure to enable readers to share posts on social media right from the website. You can use plugins like Sumo to achieve this. It will put up tags on your site so anyone visiting your blog can easily share your content on their social media channels.