Inside Crowded Kitchen’s Strategy for Growing to 2.4 Million Followers on Facebook

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming Lexi Harrison from the food blog Crowded Kitchen. Lexi and her mom first started sharing food content on Instagram back in 2015, and what began as a fun creative outlet for the two of them has now turned into a thriving multi-platform business with over 5 million followers across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In this podcast episode, Lexi shares more about how they strategically grew their audience, refine their content approach and learn to make social media work for their business. Lexi and Bjork chat about the benefits of prioritizing social media growth and for Crowded Kitchen focusing on building their social media falling has paid off significantly. Their social media traffic now surpasses their organic website traffic and they’re earning four to $6,000 per week just through the Facebook monetization program.

On top of that, their larger audience has allowed them to secure higher paying brand partnerships and even land a cookbook deal. Lexi walks listeners through exactly how they changed their Facebook strategy, including their posting cadence, how they recycle content, and how they’ve managed this extraordinary growth with just 200 short form videos to work with. In this interview, Lexi explains exactly how they got from 30,000 followers on Facebook in April of 2024 to over 2.4 million followers on Facebook. Now, I know I learned a lot of great strategies in this interview and I think you will as well, so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Lexi, welcome to the podcast.

Lexi Harrison: Thank you so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be about all things social media, talking about Facebook. We’re going to be talking maybe a little bit about Instagram, but I don’t want to bury the lead here for this podcast interview because it’s really impressive. You and your mom have built your social media following really over the last two years by 5 million collective followers. Is that accurate?

Lexi Harrison: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And the focus for that is maybe Rankor, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, that be kind of how you view the important platforms that you’ve built on.

Lexi Harrison: Definitely. Instagram was kind of the primary for a little over a year, and then as I’m sure you’re aware, there’ve been some rough algorithm changes in the last year. So our Facebook has actually surpassed our Instagram following and continues to grow at a great rate. So we still focus on Instagram kind of as our primary platform for engagement and everything, but Facebook, it’s kind of where it’s at

Bjork Ostrom: And it pays as well, which just as a platform. We’re going to talk about that. I want to hear about the launch point for you. So at what point did you realize that, hey, this is something that we should really invest more time in. When did you start to notice traction on the different platforms and what were the decisions you made around dedicating time to those? Because I think one of the hard things is when you aren’t yet doing what you’re doing full time, it’s hard to know how much time that you can justify spending on it. So talk a little bit about that period of time and then we’re going to talk about the inflection point when it really started to grow.

Lexi Harrison: Absolutely. So I guess just as a little background to help you understand our business, because I think we were kind of in a unique position when we started. We started back in 20, well, technically in 2015 we had a different name, superfood Runner back in Instagram was a very different place.

Bjork Ostrom: So this was Instagram that you’re talking about when you’re saying having different names started.

Lexi Harrison: We started our business exclusively on Instagram

Bjork Ostrom: And it was you and your mom to start.

Lexi Harrison: It was me and my mom to start. I was actually still in college. I ran track and field, which is

Bjork Ostrom: Love it. What were your events?

Lexi Harrison: Long distance, so mostly,

Bjork Ostrom: Bless you. I did the 800, which I don’t think is that mid distance.

Lexi Harrison: Yeah, my husband

Bjork Ostrom: For two years, it was like seventh, eighth grade. It was a miserable race to run. Oh, it was miserable.

Lexi Harrison: That was my husband’s specialty event.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Oh man. It’s not, you’re kind of sprinting, but you can’t just sprint and it’s just so miserable. Okay, so you had this, it was kind of like food, but also an interest, which was track and field started posting content on Instagram

Lexi Harrison: And

Bjork Ostrom: That was just you at that point.

Lexi Harrison: So it really started as just me for really only a couple of months. It was the end of my junior year, and then I ended up doing a last minute study abroad program the fall of my senior year, and my mom, she coached me in high school, my track and cross country team. So we’ve always had this kind of close working relationship and she at the time had just been taking some online courses actually about nutrition and food photography specifically, so she was like, oh, I was not going to be able to do this obviously while I was abroad. So she was like, oh, I’m more than happy to help keep the account running and just, I don’t even know what we were posting chia pudding

Bjork Ostrom: At the time. It’s running adjacent food that you might eat if you’re somebody who runs a lot.

Lexi Harrison: And yeah, I went to a really small school, so I wasn’t able to cook for myself. It was only so it was just trying to, I don’t even know. We had no strategy at that

Bjork Ostrom: Time. Sure, you were posting content and just kind of exploring and learning. It was like the

Lexi Harrison: Smoothie Bowl era.

So she joined on and we’ve been doing it together ever since then. My first job out of college was actually with the feed Feed back when they were a very small startup and I worked there for a year and really started doing all of their social media content, all of their videography and photography for their brand campaigns. After a year there, we were still running a superfood runner on the side and realized that I wanted to take that full time with my mom. So I moved back home to Michigan and we rebranded to Crowded Kitchen that fall, which was 2017, and we’ve been doing this together ever since. So we really exclusively started on Instagram and because that was such a different time in Instagram world, it’s like you could post a colorful smoothie bowl, no recipe, one photo, you could do it in 10 minutes and get, I dunno, 10,000 likes or so given 3000 followers. So we actually were able to grow our social and media account pretty well. I think we surpassed a hundred K within the first year of doing it seriously

Bjork Ostrom: By focusing on, and what’s interesting for me here is you had a really awesome experience working for the feed feed in that not only were you working doing the social content, but it sounds like you were working, doing the branded social content for them. So developed an understanding of brand partnerships, what those relationships look like, what brands wanted. My guess is you carried some of that over in a way that was advantageous for you to do branded partnerships in the early stage, and is that how you supported yourself in that season was growing the account, but then also finding and partnering with brands who would pay you to publish content in a similar way to what you were doing before except this time you’re actually getting paid by the brand instead of a W2 position at a company.

Lexi Harrison: Definitely. I feel like I had a better sense too of what I should be paid. So of course we were doing some stuff for free back then. That was the time. That’s what you do. We at least were getting paid better than if I had just been going off of my gut instinct, I probably would’ve charged like $50 or something time. So that helped for sure. But another important part of our business that’s actually been a really important part since the start has been freelance content creation. So I did have one client that I was doing long-term content creation for and actually doing some social media consulting for. So we had always had that as a backup, and that’s actually continued to be a really big part of our business. It’s grown actually over the years

Bjork Ostrom: And still today is, which it would be interesting to talk about that in a little bit.

Lexi Harrison: Great. Yeah, I’d talk about that because that’s actually a huge part of our business. So we had that going on as a backup and then a couple of sponsored posts lined up, and I also was moving in with my parents again, so that helped a lot. I didn’t have to have a ton of stuff lined up, but yes, that was definitely valuable experience and we were just able to grow quickly. Back then, it was just much, much, much easier. And unlike you guys, we did not start with a blog. We didn’t really have a website for quite a while, and even when we did start our website, which I think was in 2017 when we rebranded a crowded kitchen, it was on Wix and we had literally zero idea what SEO was. Nothing was optimized. It was a joke. So I think we continued with that for another two years or so and continued to grow on social media. I think we hit about 215,000 sometime in 2019 or 2020

Bjork Ostrom: And up until this point, the monetization is branded partnerships and freelance content creation.

Lexi Harrison: That was it. There no was no blog income, there was no Facebook, none of these other sources. So we actually did a ton of content creation for brands at that point. That was what was making us a lot of money. And

Bjork Ostrom: These were for brands, not for other creators.

Lexi Harrison: Correct. We did go through an era a couple years ago where we actually did do some photography for other bloggers, and that was fun while we did it, but obviously there’s a lot more money in

Bjork Ostrom: The money mindset of an individual who’s a content creator and the willingness to pay for something is very different than a brand who maybe has a marketing budget and the person who’s in charge of marketing, it’s probably not their money. When you’re a creator and you’re spending your own money and it’s like you could either transfer it to this agency or you could transfer it into your personal bank account. It feels different than some food company who’s been allocated $250,000 or a million dollars for their marketing budget for the year, and they’re spending 20,000 to have content created for them. Yeah, interesting observation, but that makes sense. So you’re doing these branded partnerships, you’re not necessarily publishing the content to your own site, you’re creating content for them because they need content. This is images and videos and is it social images and videos?

Lexi Harrison: Yeah, mostly. I mean back then reels weren’t really a thing, so it was more professional

Bjork Ostrom: Images,

Lexi Harrison: Videos,

Bjork Ostrom: And

Lexi Harrison: Regular images. Of course, they were using them on social media, but also just for ad campaigns, new products, Facebook

Bjork Ostrom: Ads, so it’s like a food agency, like a food content agency, which I think that mindset is helpful. I have a friend who has a video agency. I’ve talked to him about him. His name is Nate a few times on the podcast, and it’s like when you’re an agency, the budget available is just very different. Brands are willing to pay if they’re going to use something as a paid video campaign that’s going to promote their new launch of a new product line. And so it’ll be interesting to talk about that a little bit. But continuing on the story arc, my guess is eventually as you continue to build your social following, you start to think, Hey, maybe there’s another opportunity to create a new revenue source, which would be add income and that at and say it again,

Lexi Harrison: 2019. We also just wanted to look more professional. We were like, okay, at this point if we’re going to be selling ourselves as recipe creators, we really need to have a website to go along with this Instagram page. And I don’t even think really, I think it was really just Instagram. I mean, TikTok wasn’t around at that time. I don’t think we really posted on Facebook. It was literally just Instagram for our own content.

So yeah, we built out an actual WordPress site I think in 2019, and then we kind of hit a plateau with social media. We created a ton of content. I mean pandemic of course, we created a ton of content between 2020 and 2023 for our own platforms, but many other creators. We kind of went through this period on social media where it was really a different time before 2020, and it was much easier to grow. And of course the type of content that was performing well was very different. It was pretty much all still images. And then we saw reels come out and we were many other creators very resistant to

Bjork Ostrom: Switch

Lexi Harrison: Gears and we’re like, oh, we don’t

Bjork Ostrom: Really, your job changes. You have a new job?

Lexi Harrison: Yeah, totally new style. We were like, maybe it’s just a phase, we’ll just keep posting photos. Then they stopped doing well and we stopped growing and we, because we have this content creation part of our business, we were like, oh, let’s just kind of focus on that and

Bjork Ostrom: For the brands, let’s focus on branded partnerships.

Lexi Harrison: And we’re like, well, and just our photography and videography for other,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, the agency. Yeah,

Lexi Harrison: It’s kind of easier in some ways. I don’t have to be putting this content out, it’s just you send it over and you’re done. So we kind of focused on that pretty heavily for a while and totally ignored our social media. But then we did start, we were like, okay, I guess we got to start doing some reels and we started doing those in 2022, but we had no strategy. We were just filming whatever we were putting on our website, and the lighting wasn’t great, and the editing wasn’t great, and we were kind of freehanding a lot of stuff. We were like, at least we’re getting something up, whatever. But then they were only getting 10,000 views, and at this point we still had 215,000 followers. So it was disappointing for sure,

Bjork Ostrom: And that you could have put the same amount of work in for an agency deal and you have a dollar amount attached to that and you’re like, well, I would imagine it’s a difficult when you put those side by side to say, I could do this on my own account, get 10,000 views, maybe not grow the following that much, or I could get paid whatever, X thousands of dollars if I did this for a brand. It probably was kind of compelling to just continue to do the agency work to create content for other brands.

Lexi Harrison: And it still is in some ways for sure, because I definitely am not the most extroverted creator out there.

Bjork Ostrom: Point being, you don’t love the idea of putting yourself out there as, yeah, it feels good to do the kind of quiet creation that you pass to somebody else. Yeah,

Lexi Harrison: Absolutely. So that’s kind of always been a struggle for me personally actually. But yeah, we did though get to the point, so my husband ended up joining our team during the pandemic. He formally was a financial analyst, so a big change for him, and it took him kind of a year or two to really get adjusted in his role and he kind of got to the point in about May or April, may of 2023 where he was like, alright, I feel like we got a totally overhaul our social media strategy because this is just pointless. It’s like we’re putting all this effort in and nobody’s seeing them still, photos aren’t doing well either anymore. We have to change something. And his big thing was I see other people doing well, so I know it’s possible.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Lexi Harrison: We just got to figure it out.

Bjork Ostrom: I think what’s so cool about that is I love when somebody from the outside comes in who’s strategic smart analyst and approaches it almost not as social media, but just as a problem. And the problem is we want to grow more and we’re not, how do we solve this? And it almost is a cleaner approach than somebody who comes with a lot of preconceived notions of what it looks like and how it works, which is really cool. So what did you discover in 2023 as the three of you went through this process?

Lexi Harrison: Yeah, he kind of just took a couple of days, was on the explore page on Instagram and just took a bunch of notes on what he was seeing on these viral videos and at that time, I mean some of these principles are still important for sure, but it was like lighting, having a little bit more of a lifestyle setup with some plants in the background versus having photography backdrop and having it feel like a studio, closeup shots, really quick transitions, interesting recipe concepts, not necessarily just what we were doing on our website. And so we came up with a couple of ideas. Our first idea actually was at our wedding in 2018, we had a pretty small wedding, so we did the cocktails and stuff for it, and we did a few cocktails where we infused. We did a strawberry infused vodka and a jalapeno infused tequila or something, and we made our signature cocktails with those. So we’re like, okay, I don’t think I’ve really seen this on social media. Let’s post this as a video and let’s do a little bit of storytelling. So the voiceover was a couple years ago when we got married, we made this strawberry infused vodka. Everyone loved it, blah, blah, blah. And literally that first video went viral. I think that was the craziest feeling watching that. So fun. Yeah, it was insane.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you think if you were to pinpoint something about it, you talked about your husband, what’s your husband’s name?

Lexi Harrison: Brent.

Bjork Ostrom: Brent. So Brent takes this time to study to analyze. He’s an analyst. He’s looking at, okay, what are the through lines with this? Talked about some of the technical things, lighting, but also some of the more intuition around a thing that isn’t necessarily technical like lifestyle or the other piece that you said was storytelling. So if you were to pinpoint something with that piece of content that maybe then became a through line with the other pieces of content that did well, would it be any of those things, storytelling, lighting, or what else would it be that you would point to?

Lexi Harrison: It’s a mix of all of those for sure. Storytelling I’ve found to this day is super important as I’m sure you guys, I know that Lindsay does a lot of that in her videos, but we did basically, I’m trying to think what that video even looked like. We basically set up this wood table in our studio and we put some plants in the background. We put a bunch of strawberries. We got a cute little strawberry towel that we put under the vodka, and now that I watch back, I’m like, okay, that was maybe a little quick. It was like a

Fucking video or something. I’m like, you can have a seizure watching that. But it was really, but it worked really short. Yeah, really quick transitions, like 0.4 second transitions for every shot and changing the angles a lot, and it was just like boom, boom, boom, boom. We made this for our wedding. Everyone loves it. It’s really cool. It’s a fun thing to do with your friends. Really short caption, just explaining how to do it. Didn’t have a blog post attached. We were just like, let’s just position this as just a social media focused piece of content and it took off. So we continue to use that strategy for the rest of that summer. We focused, our thing has kind of always been to focus on produce and seasonal content. So we really just leaned into seasonal produce and tried to think of unique ways to use produce. So I think our next thing that went viral was it was a sorbet. It was like a strawberry lemonade sorbet served in a lemon half. So again, going with something that’s visually appealing, something where maybe you’re looking at the first three seconds and you’re not totally sure what it is,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s kind of novel. There’s intrigue.

Lexi Harrison: Yeah. You’re like, how are you making this? What’s going into it? That one, we also found out pretty quickly that controversy is a good way to succeed on Instagram.

Bjork Ostrom: Talk more about that. What was controversial about it and then how did that impact things?

Lexi Harrison: Yeah, that one, I guess there’s, which I didn’t go to, I had no Costco membership at the time, so genuinely had no idea what this was, but I guess there’s this brand of sorbets that are served in fruits called Island Way sorbet, which I know now know because people commented about it about 40 million times and everyone was like, you’re just copying this from island waste to everybody. I was like, I’ve never heard of that. I literally got the idea because I’ve seen videos of people in Italy serving Italian, lemon D and lemon. It’s that simple,

Bjork Ostrom: But it’s this idea that suddenly people were commenting, which drove more people to fed the algorithm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lexi Harrison: Then you have people fighting in the comments and you know how it goes. Yeah, we were just like, this is insane. It got, I think, oh gosh, that one I feel like had maybe 15 million or something on Instagram and another 8 million on TikTok or something.

Bjork Ostrom: And are you also seeing then, from these pieces of content growth with your, so as you’re having more pieces of content that are going viral, as you start to say, Hey, we’re going to adjust some of the visual elements, but we’re also going to try and get better at storytelling. Maybe we’re going to think of things that are unique or novel or interesting. Those will go more viral from that. You also then have more followers. With more followers, potentially you’ll get more views, and it kind of became a little bit like an upward cycle.

Lexi Harrison: It was crazy that summer, I mean one of our next posts after that, we were like all the sorbet thing’s a hit, we’re going to keep going with it. We did a mango sorbet version to this day, I think it has several hundred million views across all of our social platforms, and I remember posting that and just every hour our follower account would go up by thousands. I think we probably gained 60 or 70,000 just from that one post from the first time we posted it.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.

Lexi Harrison: And it was going nuts. And our whole thing that summer was, we talked on this a little bit in the beginning. It’s like, how do you balance this social media and website and everything else that you have going on? We really took the strategy that summer of we said, screw the rest of the business. We’re just going to focus on social media and see how it goes and see if it’s too much to do it all at once, and let’s just see if we can hone in on social media, get that going, and then the rest will come later. So we were not doing anything attached to our blog at that point. All the recipes were in the caption.

Bjork Ostrom: This was 20 23, 20 23.

Lexi Harrison: Everything was just super simple, just bare bones, like four ingredient recipe, really short. We were not doing any tips, nothing like that. And it worked really well. One thing we also figured out that summer is that series were doing very well. The verdict’s still out on if they’re doing well today.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about what a series would be and how you were using series?

Lexi Harrison: Yep. So at that point we kind of were just posting random content and then seeing how things went and then deciding if we wanted to create a series based on it from there. So the alcohol ended up turning into an infused alcohol series that we actually continued all the way through. I think last summer obviously stopped when I got pregnant, but we just did probably 20 different recipes that were just different ways to infuse alcohol, and they did really well around the holidays. Yeah, it was great.

Bjork Ostrom: By doing well, does that mean the individual pieces of content? But my guess is that the incentive is also there when you are doing a series for people to follow because then they know, Hey, if I’m interested in this, not only am I seeing it, but then if there’s a mention of it being a series, people are going to want to know more of what’s going to be published on the line. So in those series, were you intentionally in the description or even in the actual video itself, mentioning the fact that it was a series and prompting people to follow?

Lexi Harrison: Yes. So back then we had a very specific formula, and I’ll actually talk more about our series that really took off. So in early 2024, I actually didn’t start it as a series, but I posted this recipe that was supposed to be like they taste like Sour Patch kids, and it was just like candied citrus peels, like sour candied citrus peels. And that post did so well that it actually got us to a million followers and I was like, alright, better than store-bought. We’re making this a series and we’re doing recipes that are either a direct copycat of a store-bought snack or food or something that’s similar and has a similar flavor profile but is made with better ingredients and the better, I don’t necessarily even mean nutritionally, but just things taste better when they’re made with good quality ingredients. So we kicked that series off in February of 2024, and that went absolutely nuts for us. So we started, we had actually already done a recipe for homemade and that had gone super viral. So we redid that and reposted it. We did crackers always do really well for us, so a bunch of homemade crackers, Pop-Tarts, goldfish, all those sorts of pieces of content, and that’s where our following just totally skyrocketed. We actually, I think hit 2 million fairly quick. I don’t remember how long it was. It was probably another six months or so after.

Bjork Ostrom: And this was 2 million on Instagram.

Lexi Harrison: On Instagram specifically. It also took off on TikTok for us because to that point, TikTok, I still haven’t cracked the code on TikTok, but we had videos that were doing very well on TikTok, TikTok, but not necessarily that wasn’t necessarily corresponding to follower growth. But once we started that better than store-bought series on TikTok, that just went nuts for us and that really encourages people to follow because obviously they want to come back for the next episode and literally we would have texts on screen that was homemade goldfish episode five of better than store-bought. So it was just very clear that this is

Bjork Ostrom: What, this is a series, this is the focus. Yeah,

Lexi Harrison: If you follow us, you’re getting another episode next week of better Than Store-bought and encouraging people to comment what they wanted to see next. Yeah, so we also did a Christmas advent calendar series in December of 2023 where every day we were pulling a recipe out of our advent calendar and making it on screen. And that’s done really well for us the last two years as well. So really most of our big follower growth periods were either from a post that went just crazy viral, like a standalone post or from these series, and I don’t know that I necessarily recommend that nowadays, but that was what was

Bjork Ostrom: Working. Then

Lexi Harrison: We ended up doing quite a bit of social media consulting actually in 2024 and was working with other food bloggers and some of them were able to create very successful series from that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about in that season, so you’re having this rapid growth, amazing millions, literally millions. What does that look like for you? So it sounds like you were doing some consulting, people are like, Hey, can you help me understand how to do the series based stuff? They’re seeing your success. Are you doing actual brand like sponsor content? You’re continuing to do the agency work. What does that look like from a business perspective as you are growing the following count? Because one of the things that I think about a lot, which is it’s so much to do, to grow a following in and of itself is an incredible lift to create the content is an incredible lift, and then you have all the considerations around now that you’ve done that, how do you create an income around this business? And it requires so much from an individual, or in your case, two individuals with your mom being involved. Whereas in a lot of companies it’d be multiple departments. You’d have the content creation department, you’d have the advertising and brand partnership department. So how did you navigate the business component of creating revenue as you’re also growing the following count?

Lexi Harrison: That was always and still is tricky for us. A lot of things fall through the cracks. We have a lot going on. The first year, to be honest, when we were doing this social media stuff, specific stuff, I think we were so caught up in this growth that we didn’t focus that much on monetization. We were just like, this is so great. We’re gaining all these followers and eventually down the road we’re going to monetize stuff in a very significant way because obviously the idea is that the bigger your audience is, the more opportunities you have. We actually ended up signing a cookbook deal at that time, and then we did obviously start getting more brand partnerships and our rate was significantly higher, which was great, but it wasn’t really until, yeah, I guess last spring that we were like, we’re really missing out on some monetization from Facebook specifically, Instagram was monetized back then. Now it is not even TikTok with one minute videos. We were like, all right, we really got to hone in on this and also our website because we went through this period where we were posting literally every single recipe in the caption, and sometimes we would put it on the website, especially if it was around the holidays, and we were like, all right, well even if people save this, because the idea was that it was boosting bookmarks and saves and shares, which is still true for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: But idea being that that was a beneficial thing. If you have the recipe in and people are bookmarking or saving it, that it’s going to tie into the algorithm and show the Okay, got it.

Lexi Harrison: Which I do still think is true for sure, but at the same time it’s like, okay, well we want to keep these, make sure that these people are actually interested in our brand and are going to be long-term readers. So we were constantly like, how do we have to put stuff on the blog? We have to put stuff on the blog, and we would always run out of time. So last year we really were like, we got to change the strategy a little bit, even if we sacrificed some views on social media.

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Lexi Harrison: So I can’t take total credit for this Facebook strategy. I did have a consulting session of my own with the Food Dolls who are killing it on Facebook especially, and they gave me some tips for Facebook and it went nuts for us. So I do want to touch a little bit on our strategy there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, Facebook would be great to talk about that.

Lexi Harrison: I think Instagram is so fickle and the algorithm is constantly changing, so I used to be pretty confident about my advice with Instagram content

Bjork Ostrom: And it feels like it’s

Lexi Harrison: Now, I’m not honestly not sure, but Facebook is a little steadier, so I’m just going to kind of run through our general strategy, and I think that pretty much anyone can see at least a bit of a lift from implementing.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great.

Lexi Harrison: Yeah, so the basic thing with Facebook is just consistency and trial and error and just posting a ton

Bjork Ostrom: By a ton. What does that look

Lexi Harrison: Like? You can post as much as you want. That can be if you don’t have a ton of time, maybe that’s four times a day. If you do have a ton of time or if you have an assistant or someone that can help you, that’s like 10 plus times a day.

Bjork Ostrom: And is that all different types of content? Maybe we’ll get into that for sure.

Lexi Harrison: Videos are king. Absolutely. And I don’t think that’ll necessarily ever change, but I was actually looking at a breakdown of my monetization earlier today, and I was kind of surprised by how it all worked out. I mean, you even can monetize stories, which are literally no effort because I just pressed the button that says repost to stories. When you post a

Bjork Ostrom: Publishing to Instagram, you republish to Facebook

Lexi Harrison: No

Bjork Ostrom: Effort, and then can monetize those.

Lexi Harrison: Yes,

Bjork Ostrom: Exactly.

Lexi Harrison: So there’s a lot of options for monetization on Facebook. So when we first started out doing this last year, so we didn’t start getting pretty serious about Facebook until April of 2024, and at that point I think we maybe had, I don’t know, 30,000 followers or something, and now we have 2.3 million and it’s almost 2.4 and it’s continuing to grow.

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing. So in a year and a half,

Lexi Harrison: Over a year, year and a half.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Lexi Harrison: And we went from making, I was pretty much just reposting our reels on Facebook once and that was it. And we were still making some money from that, but it was maybe a couple hundred bucks a month. We went from making that to pretty much immediately after I implemented this strategy, we were making several thousand a month. And it’s continued. It fluctuates throughout the year for sure,

Bjork Ostrom: And the Facebook monetization now has changed in that there’s one general Facebook monetization program and you get approved to that. I don’t even know what the process looks like. And then basically anything you post has the potential to be monetized, is that right?

Lexi Harrison: Exactly. And it used to be, yeah, everything was broken down by the type of content, and now it’s like you said, it’s just general monetization. I was also trying to do some research earlier to understand what the qualifications are to monetize now, and I couldn’t really find anything that I thought was super, I think maybe anyone can apply for monetization or you might just have it.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have to be at a certain level or? Yeah,

Lexi Harrison: It used to be like 5,000 followers and some watch time month, but I couldn’t find anything really specific on that, so I’m not a hundred percent, but now it’s basically just one block of monetization, but it does still break it down. I was looking at mine today, and it’s like reels, photos, stories, and then text-based posts. And then there’s also a bonus program. So again, I don’t know if everyone has this available or if it’s just available to some creators, but it’s basically just a bonus based on, I believe it’s just based on your general engagement throughout the month. So I have one that’s available right now, and if I hit a certain amount of money for the month, I get an additional $500 bonus or something. Who knows how they calculate this and it probably changes every month.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Amazon has these too. If you’re part of the Amazon Associates program, it’s like creating incentives for you to hit new levels and promote more. And everybody’s incentivizing everybody everywhere. It’s like Starbucks, you get stars and McDonald’s, you get Monopoly and Facebook, you get additional bonuses if you engage more than maybe the last month or whatever it might be. We’re here for it. We’re here for all of them.

Lexi Harrison: We are definitely here for, yeah. So yeah, this year really we’ve just been experimenting more with getting people to our website. Like I said, that’s been a focus for us with having a baby. It hasn’t gone as well as we hoped.

Bjork Ostrom: You mean

Lexi Harrison: We just have done

Bjork Ostrom: Totally, yeah.

Lexi Harrison: But even actually when I was on maternity leave this summer for a couple months, I pretty much didn’t post anything on Facebook, and I think we were still making a thousand dollars a week from doing absolutely nothing.

Bjork Ostrom: In that case, it truly is passive. This business isn’t passive. If you want to continue growing, if you want to continue to have, even if you want to maintain, it’s not passive, but it can be passive in stretches. And I feel like that’s one of the great values of these things that we are building is you can go on a trip and if you’re doing agency work, it’s not passive. You stop working and you stop getting paid. But if you’ve grown a Facebook following and you figured out a strategy that works and Facebook is paying money and then you don’t post for a month, three months, whatever it is, there’s a very good chance that you’ll continue to get paid. Or if your website’s earning money, there’s a very good chance that you’ll continue to earn money. It might shrink a little bit, but you’ll still have that. And that’s a really great feeling.

Lexi Harrison: And if you have things that have gone viral many times, you just go in schedule a few of those, then you get a little boost every once in a while and it’s totally worth the five minutes that it does take to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. And so if you are actively posting, what does that look like? So that a thousand dollars a week, is that two or $3,000 a week potentially just from Facebook?

Lexi Harrison: So it really fluctuates throughout the year. Summer seems to be the worst time, which I think makes sense. People aren’t necessarily on their phones as much. Holidays are obviously amazing, but in our top months, I think we’ve made four to 6,000 a week

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing.

Lexi Harrison: On Facebook. And then we are now getting a ton of traffic on our website from it. So in the last month, our revenue from our website, our Facebook, our social media traffic has actually exceeded our organic traffic, which we don’t have a crazy website, so that’s maybe not saying much for some people.

Bjork Ostrom: No, but it’s substantial in that not only are you earning from the platform itself, but you are also earning from the traffic that the platform sends, which when you compare that against an Instagram, it gets more complex from what is my relationship to Instagram as a creator. It’s like maybe branded partnerships. It’s awareness. It’s like maybe we were just talking about this today. How do we as smart as possible approach posting content to Instagram knowing that what we are selling is free content? And that’s a lot easier on Facebook when they’re going to pay you to post and you can put a link in and then people click on it and go to your site. The formula is very different. And so it’s interesting to see the rise of Facebook again, where when we’ve been creating content as long as we have 15 years, it was like, man, Facebook was the best thing ever.

And then they flipped the switch. You lost all this organic social traffic that you could get from Facebook. But now that you really see this second coming of Facebook where people partly because of the incentive around creating revenue, but also because of the ability to send traffic, there’s a new renewed interest in Facebook. So can you talk about posting frequency? And then you also talked about, hey, if you have some stuff that you knew went viral, you can go and pull that up again and post it again. What are your other strategies that have been working with Facebook today knowing that you referenced Instagram and being like, eh, it’s kind of hard to know on Instagram as of today, but Facebook, it seems like there’s some things that you feel a little bit more confident in frequency posting a lot videos like reels doing well, reposting content that does well. What else would be important things for us to be aware of as creators?

Lexi Harrison: So we basically recycle our content every three or four weeks on Facebook and even Instagram. There are things that I’ve reposted this year that have gotten 30 million views in 2024, and then I repost ’em this year and they don’t even hit a million. So that’s disappointing to see for sure. But Facebook, they’re

Bjork Ostrom: More predictable

Lexi Harrison: That I have reposted like 12 times and they’ve gone viral four or five times, several million views every time that they’re posted.

Bjork Ostrom: Real quick. When you say reposting, does that mean literally it’s a file on your computer and you upload it again into Facebook, you schedule it, and so it exists 12 times if you were to scroll back far enough in your feed?

Lexi Harrison: So it’s actually just changed on Facebook. So before two weeks ago, I think there were basically two different ways to post videos. There were reels and then there were regular videos. And with the regular videos, you could just click a little button that said, it didn’t say repost, but it doesn’t even matter now because it’s not available. But basically you could just reschedule an existing post that was already uploaded into Facebook. It already had the caption in there. It was all you had to do was schedule the post. And

Bjork Ostrom: In that case, would you still see the other comments or it would be a new piece of content?

Lexi Harrison: They’re still distinct individual posts, but it’s just repurposed. The content is already uploaded in there, which is so nice. And sometimes it would show the cumulative views that had gotten through all of those reposts. Sometimes it didn’t. Facebook is, I’m not sure what they’re doing over there, but now it is all just reels and I’m not seeing that button anymore. So now you do have to re-upload the content, so

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Lexi Harrison: I actually just have a folder on my desktop that’s just all of my reels. So it’s super easy to upload everything. And when it comes to actually posting the reel, it’s really as short as possible. You literally just need to put the recipe title as the description and the title. That’s it. You don’t need to write out a whole little paragraph. You don’t need to put any information about where to find the recipe, none of that. You could write one little sentence that’s just like, this is a holiday, family favorite, whatever. And then when you post, you want to put the recipe information in the comment section. We’ve pretty consistently found that if you put a link in the description in a video on Facebook, it usually tanks. And then of course, you are going to have some people that are not understanding where to find the recipe. But frankly, that’s the case

Bjork Ostrom: With

Lexi Harrison: Anybody.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, everything everywhere, no matter what you’re doing on the internet. Exactly. So

Lexi Harrison: We set up use grocers list instead of ManyChat for our DM automation. So we have that set up for Facebook, and we’ll put the link in there. So our audience is somewhat trained to know to comment recipe, but then we will have a comment that just says, comment recipe, and we’ll send it to your inbox or get the full recipe here, and then I’ll just link to our blog post sometimes.

Bjork Ostrom: And do you think the psychology with that is people can click and just get there if they want to get it, or some people kind of like the idea of almost like a bookmark, that they’re saving it? Yes. Yeah,

Lexi Harrison: And some people I don’t really understand.

Bjork Ostrom: Who knows why

Lexi Harrison: People would do that, honestly,

Bjork Ostrom: But they do it,

Lexi Harrison: But they do it for sure. And some people of course do prefer to just have the recipe in the comments, which I know as creators, that took me a long time to get over. But sometimes I just do it because you’re making the revenue from Facebook, which is very significant sometimes, especially around the holidays. And then you are still getting a lot of people that are clicking through to your website. So for me, it depends on the piece of content, but sometimes it’s worth it to also just put or even a condensed version of the recipe in the context. And sometimes it’s great to just create content that is just for social media. I recommend that actually a lot. I think it’s so much work to create a whole blog post and do all the photography and everything, and if you’re not sure that it’s going to be valuable to your website, just post it on social. And honestly, it cuts the time by a lot, and sometimes you’re making just as much money.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. And so when you’re posting to Facebook, it’s like a short little description or maybe the recipe name, you are not including a link to the recipe in the description, but then you are pinning a comment.

Lexi Harrison: So unfortunately you can’t pin comments anymore on Facebook, which I don’t understand why, but

Bjork Ostrom: You’re just commenting after.

Lexi Harrison: I just comment after. Actually, you can also schedule comments. So if you schedule a bunch of content out and then you go into your scheduled posts on Facebook, you can basically just click on the post and then leave a comment and it’ll publish with that content or with that comment. So that’s really helpful because obviously I’m not doing all of this live. So that’s kind of my strategy for reels. And so like I said, we repost every three to four weeks. You really can’t post a piece of content too frequently on Facebook. I usually try to wait if something is going viral. You can obviously see analytics of when the views are happening. So I usually try to wait until something is tailing off to repost it again, but you really can’t post too often on Facebook. And

Bjork Ostrom: If in your ideal world, let’s say you had no other obligations, how much would you be posting?

Lexi Harrison: For me, because we haven’t actually created very much content in the last year because we were working on our cookbook and I was pregnant, we don’t have a huge bank of content, so I think I max out around eight posts a day. But we are now experimenting with a lot more still posts, just photos or even, we’ve actually just started literally doing the link to our website, how it just populates a link and a photo and we’re like, let’s just see how these do. And at first I was like, wow, these are doing terribly. They’re getting three likes. And then you go and look at the analytics and they’re a couple hundred clicks to your website, so it’s totally worth it to just try anything on. Well,

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s interesting, I think of it, what does that look like when it converts over? And to use a super easy, rough estimate, let’s say that you have a site and you’re using an ad partner and you have a RPM that you can look at. And then from that you can look at, okay, what is the earning RPM? How much are you earning when somebody comes over from a source? And so let’s say it’s $40 for Facebook and you get 500 people who come over. So was it worth the two minutes it took to schedule a link to make $20? Probably. And then what you do is you start to stack that and you say like, okay, can I do that predictably once a day? Okay, that’s cool. That’s like $600. Can you do it twice a day? Okay, $1,200. Okay, what is another area that I could publish content to and make a thousand dollars?

And incrementally, what you can do is you can start to be really strategic about thinking about essentially syndicating your content into different places. And it’s one of the great things about Facebook is that you do that and it sounds like you can then do that again in two months, as long as it’s seasonally appropriate and get another 500 clicks or whatever it is for your site depending on how many people are following and whatnot. So you were maybe talking about this a little bit. You said you wait a certain period of time before republishing something that’s essentially like six to eight weeks it sounds like, or it depends.

Lexi Harrison: It depends on the piece of content, but often it’s like three to four weeks. I really don’t space them out that far. Obviously it’s seasonal, then we’ll stop posting summer. We’re probably not posting much summer content right now, and we’re really ramping up. And that’s another thing too. You can post Christmas content on Facebook in September, August and you get a few comments, but it starts pretty well, honestly, at this point. Yeah, yeah. It’s really, you just have to find a way to make it as efficient as possible because when you’re first starting out, it’s going to take a little bit longer to figure out your specific strategy and figuring out how to add the comment in the scheduler. It takes a little bit of time to figure out a flow, but especially if you have somebody, if you’re fortunate enough to have somebody that is doing some virtual thing, that’s a great hack. Someone could spend literally 20 minutes a day scheduling out a bunch of posts. And even, for example, with the links to the website posts, they’re not necessarily generating revenue, a ton of revenue on the Facebook monetization program. But that’s where I’m just choosing to be like, okay, what’s more important with those is building an audience on our website and getting these repeat visitors.

And then the videos really if you want to succeed and grow on Facebook, it’s about the videos. A hundred percent. So

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk more about that? So now it sounds like there’s one general video, not a Facebook expert, so this is me learning as well. There’s one general video upload. Now it’s not like reels versus there used to be reels and then videos. Is it just reels now or is it just video? How does that work?

Lexi Harrison: It’s just reels now. There’s no limit on the amount of time. It could be, I guess, as long as you want it to be. It’s not like Instagram where it’s a three minute time limit, but yeah, everything is now uploaded as a reel. They just changed that a couple of weeks ago.

Bjork Ostrom: And is it all vertical then? You can still upload horizontal or

Lexi Harrison: Horizontal.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. But it’s just called reels.

Lexi Harrison: Yeah. I don’t really know. I mean, it is kind of nice that they simplified it because when I was trying to explain it to people, I’m like, well, and also do a video. And it’s like, is that the same as a reel? It’s like, no, but also it kind of is. It looks the exact same. So yeah, that’s one change, but that’s really where you’re going to see growth. If you have something that goes viral on Facebook, you’re going to see follower growth for sure. And we are consistently seeing it surpass Instagram constantly.

Bjork Ostrom: Growth growth per day. Growth per day.

Lexi Harrison: Yeah. I was looking back at over the last year and a half since we’ve been really focusing on Facebook, and I don’t think there has been a single day that we haven’t gained at least 700 followers.

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing.

Lexi Harrison: Most of the time it’s over a thousand. And that’s even during periods where we are not

Bjork Ostrom: Posting,

Lexi Harrison: Aren’t posting. And unlike,

Bjork Ostrom: And you attribute the majority of that to video content?

Lexi Harrison: Yes. And it’s not even necessarily Instagram where the follower growth there was driven by these series. Obviously we do post our series on Facebook, but it doesn’t seem, we’re kind of posting it more sporadically and it’s interspersed with a ton of other content. So I don’t think that people are necessarily just following, it’s not quite Instagram in that sense, where they’re maybe not following you for your brand so much as they are just because they want good recipes. I just think Facebook is a little bit different in that sense.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s weird. Facebook is weird.

Lexi Harrison: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Lexi Harrison: They’re like, oh, this looks like something I would eat, so I might as well follow because maybe I’ll make something from this page. And it’s just different. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a little bit more, it’s feels like the branding component is less curated. It’s more of like, Hey, this is content adjacent to what I want to see in my feed. I’m going to click follow. Who knows if that’s the actual mindset, but it’s kind of what it feels like. And so you would attribute that to video content. One of the questions I have, how much video content do you have? You’ve grown this to over 2 million on how many videos

Lexi Harrison: At this point? We probably have 200 maybe that perform decently Well, we have videos from back in the day that I don’t post at all because I have tried to post them on Facebook and they still don’t do well. I think maybe around 200. And that’s including branded partnership videos, which by the way, another great thing to touch on there. I actually just posted one the other day. That was a sponsored video that we did in May, I think, and it went over a million, which is better than it performed on Instagram. And we’re continuing to post those time after time. So that’s hugely beneficial for brand partnerships. Anyway, though we

Bjork Ostrom: Point being it’s dual benefit. We’ve had a couple pieces of content like that. We get paid to create the content, get paid to post the content. The content does well. Exactly. It’s awesome for the brand that you’re working with. Awesome. For you, it’s like the best outcome from a content creation business perspective.

Lexi Harrison: And it’s incredible to be able to show them a year later, look how many views this video generated from me posting it eight times.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That is a great relationship component for branded partnership as well.

Lexi Harrison: Exactly. Especially for our long-term partners. I’m sorry, I lost track of

Bjork Ostrom: No, that’s great. So yeah, we were talking about kind of the components that have gone into the growth. And the piece that I was most interested in is you’ve grown to over 2 million followers, a thousand followers a day, oftentimes more than that. And I think this is the interesting and important piece. Some people would think, goodness, you must be cranking out content every day. It’s just good content and then strategic reposting of that content. And it’s not just video, but it sounds like video has been the most important, but it’s video interspersed with some links, interspersed with maybe an image, interspersed with maybe just text. All of these have resulted in really significant growth, but it doesn’t require you to be shooting every day ad nauseum, which I think is the important point within this.

Lexi Harrison: Absolutely not. Yeah. It’s really, really, really about quality over quantity. When we were first starting out with this new strategy, I think our goal was to film three pieces of content or post three pieces of content per week, and then that quickly went down to two. And this year, frankly, it’s been one a lot of the times and pretty much my entire maternity leave, it was zero and we were just reposting content that did well last year. And I mean, we’re at the point now where we really want to put a lot more effort back into Instagram because we’ve really let it slide over the last couple of months, but you can keep this going a hundred percent on old content. I mean, we literally did not create a new piece of content from I think April to July or

Bjork Ostrom: Something,

Lexi Harrison: So

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. We could talk

For hours about this and maybe we need to have you back on because I think the way that you were thinking about your content business, and obviously your mom as well, who’s a huge part of it and want to acknowledge that, and your husband too, who’s a huge part of it, it sounds like, but the way that you’re all collectively thinking about this I think is aligned with a type of strategy that I think is important to talk more about, which is we are not just content creators, we are content publishers, and part of the strategy is in the content that we create, but a huge part of the strategy is in then our approach in publishing and syndicating that content across multiple platforms, each platform being a little bit different. So we could go on and on, but we need to wrap up. One of the things I do want to shine a light on is you have this cookbook, we want to link to that, make sure that people are aware of that so they can check that out. Can you talk a little bit about that and where people might be able to find that?

Lexi Harrison: Yeah, so it’s called Crowded Kitchen and it is going to be published in late February, so we’re getting excited. We should be getting our first real copy soon.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Lexi Harrison: Yeah, it’s available for pre-order, pretty

Bjork Ostrom: Much pre-order. That’s like the thing, right? You got to get a lot of pre-orders. Get the pre-orders up. Yes. Got

Lexi Harrison: To get the pre-orders.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Lexi, this was awesome. Thank you. It’s inspiring for me. I know it will be for other people, and I wish you continued success in all that you do. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate it.

Lexi Harrison: Yeah, thank you so much.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would really appreciate it if you could share it with your community and or leave a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. If you’re listening to this episode, the day it goes live on Tuesday, December 2nd, I wanted to let you know that tomorrow is the last day of our Cyber Monday sale. As part of the sale, you can get an annual Food Blogger Pro membership for just $250, or you can join as a monthly member for just $22 a month. You can head to food blogger pro.com/cyber-monday–2025 to learn more, or there will be a link in our show notes. Next week on the podcast, we will be doing another blogging news round table in which Bjork and I cover the latest news strategies and tips so that you don’t have to spend hours of your time reading articles. And that’s it for this week. We hope you have a wonderful week kicking off the holiday season, and we will see you next week.