Food Blogging News Roundtable: The State of SEO, Pinterest Search, and the Facebook Algorithm

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how you can optimize the existing posts on your blog without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? With Clariti, you can discover optimization opportunities with just a few clicks. Thanks to Clariti’s robust filtering options, you can figure out which posts have broken links, missing alt text, broken images, no internal links, and other insights so you can confidently take action to make your blog posts even better. We know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you’re making your good content even better. And that’s why we created Clariti. It’s a way for bloggers and website owners to feel confident in the quality of their content. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to Clariti.com/food. That’s Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. We’re back with another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is Ann from the Food Blogger Protein. Today, Bjork is chatting with Emily Walker, associate general manager of Food Blogger Pro about the latest updates and trends we shared in our food blogging newsletter. Between Google’s constant updates and the changing habits of social media users, the content creator’s playbook looks a lot different than it used to. In this episode, Bjork and Emily break down why SEO isn’t actually dying. It’s just evolving into something that demands a lot less robot speak and a lot more human connection. They’ll also dive into how Pinterest is quietly becoming the search engine of choice for Gen Z and discuss the fascinating new ways Instagram is letting users hack their own algorithms to see more of what they actually want. If you want to know how to structure your content for machines, but write it for actual people and keep your sanity in the process, this conversation is exactly what you need to hear this week. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Emily, we’re back.

Emily Walker: We’re back.

Bjork Ostrom: Here we are again. There’s more news. Believe it or not, the internet has continued to move forward. Companies have continued to not only publish new articles, but also create new features. There’s new things in the world, and we here at Food Blogger Pro are here to talk about it. Do you want to give a high-level recap of what this specific podcast episode is before we jump into the articles?

Emily Walker: Yes, absolutely. So happy New Year, everybody. This is our blogging bews roundtable, and these podcast episodes are loosely based on our food blog newsletters that go out once a month or sometimes twice a month to our Food Blogger Pro email list. If you’d like to sign up, you can just go to foodbloggerpro.com and sign up for our newsletter on the homepage. And I write these on some months and my coworker Ann writes them on others, but we just try and highlight some of the most notable or actionable news items in the food creator news space every month. And usually have four to six articles, and then Bjork and I hop on this call to debrief about them. And if you don’t feel like you have time to read all these articles, we try and make it short and sweet so that you don’t need to.

Bjork Ostrom: You can put it on 3X speed, get through it really quick.

Emily Walker: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. If you don’t have much time at all. And the thing with a lot of these articles, not all of them, but a lot of them are the first one that we’re going to talk about. It’s talking about SEO in general, but one of the things that we do is we look at it from a food creator perspective. Emily, you are in the day-to-day of all of the happenings at Food Blogger Pro, very much so in the know with that community and also have experience partnering with food creators, even for Pinch of Yum, helping with some of the efforts that we have there. So you’re in the know. We’ve been doing this for 15 years. And so it’s our spin from a food creator perspective on articles and publications that are posting relevant news. So let’s go ahead and jump into this. It’s like everybody’s doing a wrap up, end of the year wrap up, like 2025. And this one is a 2025 SEO wrap up from the folks who create the Yoast plugin. So anything that stood out to you in particular with this one?

Emily Walker: Yeah, I think I liked this roundup from them. They did a great month by month overview of all of the changes in SEO. And I feel like for a lot of people, 2025 felt like a real seismic shift in SEO. It felt kind of scary. It felt like there were just all these huge changes that it was going to forever change what we do. And I think when I read this article, it was like, oh no, it actually wasn’t as big of a change as I think it felt like. And there was a quote from it that I thought was particularly impactful. And it said, SEO didn’t disappear in 2025. It just entered a new phase. Write for humans, structure for machines and build authority that holds up even when clicks don’t follow. And I feel like that was the most concise and clear summary I’ve read about the introduction of AI overviews and everything. So yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: The thing that I really appreciated about that, and you can kind of gloss over it if you don’t go slow, is this idea of number one, right for humans, meaning, okay, somebody who’s coming to read your article, that’s going to be a human. But also there are these machines, these bots that are coming to your site to try and understand it. And where it references this idea of structure, it’s important that we structure our content for machines and bots. And in the recipe world, the real easy example of that is you have a recipe card. That recipe card is structured. It has structured data that provides information to these machines and bots about what it is about. And so there’s all these technical things that we can be doing that are kind of table stakes. And it’s not going to, we’re going to be talking about an article a little bit later on about Google penalizing sites, penalizing sites, depending on your preference there, tomato samato. I will be using penalizing as my way to what you say, thank you. And you need to have all the structured data, but what you shouldn’t be doing then is also writing all of your content as if it was for a search engine. Again, we’re going to talk about that a little bit more later. The other thing that stood out to me with this is just kind of putting two words what we all know is happening, which is they go month by month in here and they outline like, okay, zero click information is becoming more prevalent, meaning there are zero clicks installed that are a part of the process. You are just searching and that search result shows information. We all know that AI overviews are giving you answers in the search results. You’re maybe using ChatGPT and getting answers there. But the other piece that I think is really important is this idea that that doesn’t mean that you can’t build a following or build a brand online. It just means that the way you are showing up on the internet is shifting. And it always has shifted. It has always changed. And it’s just happening right now in a way that is really important for food creators, which is the world of search and specifically search within Google. But it will always change. It’ll always look a little bit different. What we need to do is we need to make decisions around, okay, what does that mean now that the landscape is changing? It doesn’t mean that you can’t build a following online. It just means that it’s going to look very different than it has in the past. So I found this to be a helpful article to kind of recap a few of the important things of which we’ve talked about on the podcast, clicks looking different, brand becoming more important, how you are showing up across these platforms becoming important, your authority as a creator being important, so a good one to check out. Anything else that we should point out with this article?

Emily Walker: Yeah. Just kind of related to this, I was at the Tastemaker Conference last week and attended a kind of short brief panel put on by the folks at Raptive. And there were a couple data points that I thought were really interesting and relevant to this. And also I think can help maybe talk you off a ledge a little bit as a creator. They said that branded search clicks matter. And so I thought that was interesting related to this, that the increasing importance of brand and being a known authority on something. So if someone is searching like Pinch of Yum chocolate chip cookies, that click matters. Also that AI usage seems to, currently, and this will obviously change, but currently is mostly additive to search behavior, but the search experience is still fragmenting. And we know that AI overviews reduce clicks by 20 to 40%, but Google query volume overall is still growing. So there are more searches on Google this year than there were last year, and that’s helping to offset some of those AI overview, zero click situations. The other thing I thought was really interesting is that AI overviews only appear in about 17% of recipe and food search queries. So I mean, that’s not a lot. And I think we think, oh my gosh, AI overviews are going to take everything, but they’re not appearing in all of our recipe search queries. There’s still people who are getting plenty of traffic from Google, so just good to keep in mind, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think one of the things that is important to think about as it relates to branded search is like, why would people be doing a branded search? Why would people be saying Pinch of Yum chocolate chip cookies? Oftentimes it’s because they have encountered your content somewhere else off of Google. And so it’s important that we optimize for Google, that we understand Google, that we have strong structured data, that we have a site that’s well structured and easy to navigate. But if you are only thinking about search as the way that people are going to discover your content, there’s going to be some long-term risks with that because more and more, especially in our space, my belief is that the strongest sites aren’t the ones that are able to really crush SEO, but the people who are able to crush on other platforms like social media to build awareness around the brand to the point that then people will go and say like, “Hey, I want to make this. I know this brand. I trust this brand. I’m going to see if they have this recipe or maybe even I saw this on social, I’m going to go out and now I’m going to search for that recipe.” So all of it is just discovery. And what we’re trying to figure out is how do we get discovered? And then once we’re discovered, what are the ways that we are going to transact? In many cases in the food world, we’re transacting by getting money from an advertising network after somebody visits our site. And so we’re trying to get discovered and then get traffic. There’s lots of other options for you as a food creator. One example would be maybe you have a product or maybe you have a cookbook or maybe you have a group that people can sign up and become a part of for a certain diet that you’re following. All of those still have that same play between discovery and then the transaction. And so that’s another thing that we can be thinking about. If it’s not traffic that you’re trying to convert it into, suddenly it becomes less important for you to think about, okay, how do I show up on ChatGPT and then get traffic there versus how do I show up on ChatGPT and become a reference or A referral to my page, whatever it might be because those are also important ways to transact that don’t rely on traffic necessarily. So some other things to be thinking about. Cool. Should we hit the next article here? Speaking of discovery, we’re talking about Pinterest and getting discovered on Pinterest and actually search as well.

Emily Walker: Yeah. So this article is all about how Pinterest is leaning into search, especially as Gen Z adoption is surging. So I thought this was interesting. 47% of Gen Zers use Pinterest as a search engine. And I think especially if you’re of my generation, which is firmly millennial, Pinterest was someplace you went to and you just scrolled. You went to the homepage, you just scrolled and you would get inspiration for things, you might pin it to a board, but it was not a search platform, at least for me at its inception. And so Pinterest is now kind of adapting to the way that Gen Z is using the platform and that two thirds of interactions on Pinterest now involve search. So as you’re creating pins, as you’re thinking about the strategy of your boards, trying to keep in mind that people may be discovering your content primarily through the search bar. Yeah. Anyways, that’s the gist of the article.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And I think even when you’re talking about that, I was thinking about what is my search behavior? And it’s actually pretty split. There are multiple different ways that I am going out and I’m searching ChatGPT for sure, oftentimes long form. We have these old pictures that we just came across, like high school pictures. Lindsay and I did it in high school, so it’s like a lot of our mutual friends and stuff, and we’re combing through them and we had some old high school friends over. We’re looking through them or it was just like, oh my gosh. And I was thinking, I need to scan these. I went to ChatGPT first to say like, “Hey, what’s the best high quality scanner? What type of DPI should I look for if I’m doing a scanner?” I did a little bit of Google search as well. But then the interesting thing for me to think about was I’m also using Google Image search, but I’m only doing that for right now in my life for coloring pages. So our daughter Lena will be like, “Dad, can we have a picture of a cat?”

Emily Walker: Highly specific coloring. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: For sure. And it’s like sometimes we can find them on Google images and then occasionally we’ll have to switch over to ChatGPT to make it. But you can see how if you are, and the most recent example for us and for Lindsay would be when we’re doing our kitchen remodel, it’s using Pinterest to have image specific searches. And so you can start to see how different platforms are going to be better or worse for certain things. ChatGPT is not going to be great for getting inspiration for actual existing kitchen remodels. Pinterest is going to be great for that. You’re going to have to decipher now a little bit of like, “Hey, is this AI or not? ” I know that we’re getting into that space. And even my friend sent me that same high school friend, he was like, “We’re talking closets,” which is what you do now when you get together with your friends. He just moved and he sent me a picture. He’s like, “Could you send me pictures of the girls’ closets because we just had them redone.” He’s like, “I need some inspiration.” And then he sent me one back and I was like, “Is this ChatGPT or is this what it actually is? ” And I was like, “If this is what it actually is, I don’t think you need to do anything.” He was like, “No, that was ChatGPT.” But I couldn’t tell in the image that he sent. And so Pinterest now is starting to include a toggle. Was it in this article that they were talking about that? I’m trying to remember. I think so. The AI off toggle essentially, because I think especially in the category of food or home DIY remodeling, it gets to be an issue when it’s like, oh, that’s super inspiring, but actually it doesn’t exist in the world. Yeah. I mean,

Emily Walker: Pinterest is really struggling with AI slop right now. I mean, a huge number of posts on Pinterest are AI, and that’s, I think, particularly problematic for recipe creators too. The closet thing. It’s like, yeah, how do you know?

Bjork Ostrom: It’d be super fascinating to see what happens with it. I know this is a specific instance, but I was talking to my mom about it and she’s like, “I’ve just kind of gotten to the point where I’m tired trying to decipher if something is real or not, so I’m just not using these platforms as much.” And I was like, “Oh, interesting.” It’s a single person and that can’t be applied broadly, but it is a little bit of user research to see it does have an impact on people and I think they make decisions based on it. But I think the takeaway here for us as creators is that these are still really important platforms even as they have issues and struggles. Pinterest specifically is a really high earning platform. So if you work with a Mediavine or a Raptive, one of the things that you should do is you should go in and see how much are you earning from the respective platforms on an RPM basis? And for us, Pinterest is always really high. So add networks for whatever reason, the companies that they’re working with deem that traffic to be more valuable. And so they pay more for Pinterest traffic. So even if your traffic’s gone down, it still pays out at a high rate. So that’s really important to be part of these platforms going forward.

Emily Walker: Related to that, in the Raptive presentation at Tastemaker, they did say that Pinterest search traffic is down 40 to 50% year over year in the Raptive network.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is- Like traffic, two sites from Pinterest.

Emily Walker: And Media, I echoed the same thing in their presentation that Pinterest traffic is down, but that RPMs remain really high. But yeah, just also interesting to note that if your Pinterest traffic is down, you are not alone. And that if reading this article taught me anything, it’s that if you want to lean more into keyword research specifically for Pinterest before you title your pins, create your pin images, that that might be a smart way to maybe gain some of that traffic back.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Still really important to do. I think psychologically, it’s always hard when you are working hard on a thing that’s a declining. It used to be this and now it’s this. It was better and now it’s worse. But what we’ve seen is these platforms will have life cycles. And this I think is really true for Facebook where I think Facebook went through a phase where it worked really well. This is like decade plus ago really well. Then it stopped working as well once Facebook started to force brands to pay for exposure. And especially in the last few years, we’ve seen this uptick where like, actually it’s a really valuable platform now. Organic reach is going up and you’re able to get in front of a lot of people. And so I wouldn’t abandon Pinterest as a platform. I know it’s hard when it used to perform better and now it’s not as performing as well, but I do think that these platforms figure things out. There can be an uptick with it. And I think about it, if it was a new platform and you were able to get this type of RPM or this type of traffic, everybody would be talking about it and doing it, but I think because it’s in decline, it’s less popular. So link to that one as well. And then a little shout out to Kate, Kate Ahl, who’s our Pinterest expert, and she has continuing education that you can check out with Simple Pin Media as well. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. Running your business can feel like a constant balancing act between making great content, keeping up with platforms, and actually earning enough to keep doing what you love. That’s where Raptive comes in. They’re the team behind thousands of the internet’s top creators, including Pinch of Yum, and they help creators grow their traffic, boost their revenue, and protect their content in an AI-driven world. Raptive creates tailored growth strategies, helping with SEO, email, and audience development. They’re serious about supporting real human-made content, and now it’s easier than ever to join. If your site gets at least 25,000 monthly page views, you can apply to become part of Raptive’s creator community and get the kind of support that scales as your business grows. To learn more or apply, visit Raptive.com. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: So our next article, this can be pretty brief. It’s just kind of chatting about a new feature on Instagram. It’s called the Your Algorithm Tool, and this launched in December, and it allows Instagram users to see and edit the topics that are currently dictating their Instagram Reels algorithm. So you can go in now and see what Instagram thinks you enjoy seeing in your algorithm, and you can toggle on or off things that you would like to see more of or less of. It’s interesting, talking about things coming full circle. I mean, Instagram used to be exactly like you would follow someone, you would see it. And I think we are kind of starting to come full circle on that again. The users are saying, “This is actually what I want to see,” and having some control over that. My dream is that this might extend to specific accounts or creators at some point, because just following someone is no longer enough to guarantee you’re going to see anything they create. So that’s kind of my hope, especially for food creators, that this might expand at some point. But anyways, that’s the new tool as it stands.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think about, I’ll occasionally send Lindsay an Instagram reel and she’s like, “I don’t want to click on … ” It’s like, I don’t know what it is, one of those dancing cat AI videos. She’s like, “I don’t want to click on this because I don’t want to feed my algorithm AI dancing cat videos because I know that there will be an AI dancing cat video that I’ll then see for three weeks straight.” And so makes a lot of sense to give people the kind of optionality to say, “Hey, I want more of this. I want less of this. ” And what does this mean as a creator? I think it’s general awareness to know that it’s there. I don’t know if there’s any necessarily action that you’d want to take as a creator at this point, other than just being aware of these platforms that are so important. And I do think that when there are options to allow people to say, “Hey, I want to see…” I think about YouTube, I know on Facebook this exists. Maybe there is somewhere on Instagram that a version of this exists that I’m not aware of, but like, “Hey, I want to prioritize your content.” You can do that within YouTube by getting notifications or within Facebook. You can go in and select the option to see more of this creator and the algorithm. There’s maybe some subtle suggestions that you could make as a creator if you want to encourage people to see more of your content, but I think this is a good one to be aware of and just this reality that these platforms every month are adding little new features. And I shared, as we were talking about Facebook as an example, there’s the Facebook for Creators page, almost 10 million people on that. It would be a good one for all creators to follow. They are posting on it, “Hey, here’s tips for features and functionality that you can use as a creator.” One of which was, “Oh, you can go to Instagram and you can select a bunch of reels and you can just auto schedule them over to Facebook and it will schedule them if they’ve never showed up on Facebook before and it will even put them on a schedule and release them to your Facebook account.” It’s like, “Oh, that’s really cool. Didn’t know that existed.” It’s a feature, so it’s not like you’re having to do a bunch of work to take advantage of it. And so these little wins that we can get as creators are super helpful. And the best way to be aware of those is to follow along with podcasts like this where we talk about them, articles like the ones or newsletters is like the ones that you’re sending out or the actual platforms where they are talking about best practices. Facebook for creators or Instagram does that as well to be following along with those as well. I was

Emily Walker: Thinking-

Bjork Ostrom: Anything else on this one?

Emily Walker: Yeah, just one tip if you did want to use this new tool. I feel like often we hear people on the podcast or just in the space who say it’s really hard when you use social media personally as someone who creates professionally because you can just be served all of these reels of different recipe creators over and over again. And it can be hard to have that not influence how you create content and then everything can kind of start to look and feel the same. So if you’re feeling that way about your recipes or your reels, could be interesting to toggle off for food or recipes. Just so you can use it personally and not be bombarded with everyone else making reels that look the same might help a little bit with your own kind of creativity and storytelling.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of my favorite things to do is look at another genre and see how they’re creating. The one that’s most easy for me to look at is like, what are musicians doing? What are the people who have these trending songs who aren’t necessarily well-known musicians doing on social media to launch those? And it’s like, oh, a quick example, they have one hit song and they create a hundred different reels, remixing it and featuring people. And I think in the recipe world, we kind of create a recipe and then we create two or three pieces of supporting content and then we move on to the next recipe. What if we approach it as if each recipe was a song and we were creating for each recipe, if you have a standout recipe, you’re actually creating like 50 reels for it. I’m not saying you should do it, but what if? And I don’t think I ever would’ve had that thought, if not for watching musicians and seeing how they’re using social platforms. And it’s like, oh, they’re not worried about their audience getting burnt out on this song. They’re just going to keep every day for three months Creating some piece of content about that song. So I think that’s a great point about not getting caught in the echo chamber of your own genre, but don’t look outside of it.

Emily Walker: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Article number four, SEO article. This is all about losing rankings, but the idea of potentially doing too much SEO. This is from PPC land. And so a familiar kind of creator Lily Ray talking about this idea of potentially too much SEO hurting rankings. You want to talk a little bit about that?

Emily Walker: Yeah. So I think the headline for the article tells you pretty much what you need to know that if you in past years have over-optimized for SEO, the recent Google algorithm updates have likely not been super friendly to you. And I think likely this article is primarily targeting people like big SEO kind of people. I don’t think this is specifically for food creators or that scale, but I think it’s a good reminder again that you’re writing for people and you’re not writing for an algorithm. And again, if your site is well structured, if you have good categories, if you have good content pillars, if you’re using recipe plugins, if your site speed is good, if you’re doing kind of the basic technical structural sides of things, just focus on writing for users, creating high quality content and you’ll be fine. Don’t over-optimize, don’t keyword stuff, all this kind of stuff we’ve been talking about, because I think increasingly Google is going to start penalizing, penalizing ah, for that.

Bjork Ostrom: I picked mine. You can pick yours.

Emily Walker: I know. Now I’m over. We

Bjork Ostrom: Can have one of those podcasts where we each say it in a different way and it kind of sounds like it feels like a passive way of recommending the other person. They change how they say it.

Emily Walker: Yeah. After this call, I’ll just look up synonyms for that word and then our next interview, I’m just going to stick with that.

Bjork Ostrom: Right, right. The other thing that I think is interesting here is, as I was reading this article, the thought that I had is Google always figures it out. If there’s like a hack that’s working, if there’s a software that is produced that allows you to at scale, optimize a piece of post, a piece of content or a post that you’re doing, I think that can be good for subtle suggestions, for insight, but if it’s like nine of these posts in Included a mention of French fries, so you should probably include a mention of French fries. I think your task as a creator isn’t then to go and be like, ChatGPT, write me about why French fries are good with hamburgers. And then H2 of like, can I include French fries with this meal? Yes, French fries are great to include with hamburgers. But to instead say, oh, is this actually a gap in this post? Would it be helpful if I included the history of French fries in here? Actually, it might be kind of weird. I won’t do that. Versus just saying like, “Hey, I want to get a good grade on this article and it says I should include this, so then I probably should.” Even if your intuition as a creator is like, that’s actually not that helpful or at worst, it might be kind of confusing. Similarly, back to what we said at the beginning, if you are writing for a search engine as opposed to a human and it’s actually more confusing for a human or it feels like stiff or rigid or not helpful. Google will always, these search engines will always figure it out because what they’re always trying to figure out is what is the most helpful piece of content for humans? And that’s going to have to do with UI, UX, how fast the site loads, how helpful it is, how engaging it is, all of those things. And the science part of it is the structured data. What does that look like to do that well? The site speed, all of that. The art part of it is like, how do you write something that’s engaging for a human that tells a story that’s sticky, that keeps people around, that answers a problem, that has good photos, that walk people through it. So it’s a good reminder, technical SEO, super important. Artistic writing and creating engaging content, super important. Both of those things together are magic,

Emily Walker: But

Bjork Ostrom: Either one of those on their own probably end up lacking. And that’s one of the hard things that we have to do as creators is pair those. Maybe you aren’t the person who does all the technical SEO and you’re really good at creating that human content or vice versa, but at least having somebody in your team that can help with that as well. So anything else on this one?

Emily Walker: No, I think that covers it.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Facebook algorithm. As a team, we’ve been thinking a lot about Facebook, talking about Facebook, obsessed with Facebook. And a huge reason why is because it’s like, oh, it’s a platform that’s working. Not only does it pay in a similar way to a YouTube would, but you can also drive traffic from that content. We talked about this idea of discovery. If you can get discovered, then there are ways that you can use that attention to get to where you eventually want to get. In our case, it’s traffic. But anything that really stood out here from this article from Buffer around Facebook algorithm?

Emily Walker: Yeah. I’ll kind of quickly run through my main takeaways from it that you can easily implement if you’re not already on Facebook. So stick to a consistent posting schedule, find something that’s realistic for you and just keep at it. Share content that invites engagement. So we know from Facebook from Meta that comments and shares and likes matter in terms of what’s shown in the algorithm. You can use the Insights tab in MetaBusiness Suite to see what content is resonating most with your audience and share it again. We’ve learned recently that you can, that’s the thing about Facebook. You can share stuff kind of over and over and over again, and it will reach different people every time. So don’t be shy about doing that. Respond to your DMs and comments ideally quickly within 24 hours is their recommendation. And then share formats that perform well on Facebook. So we know video reels great, but I thought this stat was pretty illuminating. It said, according to a 2025 report from Meta, nearly 98% of the posts that US-based users viewed didn’t include a link. So I mean, 98%. That’s wild. And I mean, I think most recipe creators almost always have historically included a link. You want to get people to the recipe, you want to get people to your site. What we’ve been experimenting with at Pinch of Yum is including … I mean, obviously if you use something like ManyChat or grocer’s list, that’s a kind of a great way to do this. But even saying in the caption link or comment recipe for the link could potentially signal to Meta that you are encouraging people off the platform. And so they might kind of downgrade how much your content gets seen. So what we’ve been doing with Pinch of Yum is just in the comments commenting recipe and then including the recipe there. People figure it out for the most part. And then the last thing is to share user generated content on Facebook. So if people tag you in their posts or share photos of your recipes, share them, share reviews of your recipes, all that can help.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. They have a handful of things they talk about in this article, number eight. What we don’t know is how Facebook’s interpreting what this article is calling engagement bait. I’m trying to see if they use an example of engagement bait, but no. But trying to figure out, okay, how do you, as much as possible, try and understand the things that Facebook is prioritizing as indicators of a good piece of content. And what’s interesting is you can actually, in Facebook, I’ve started to see this recently where you’ll scroll through and you’ll see somebody else’s piece of content. If you are logged in as your business or under the page, it will show somebody else’s piece of content and you can say see insights and it will say why that piece of content is doing well for that creator. And what it’s doing is it’s giving you a little bit of an indicator, a little bit of a hint as to why that is performing well. Usually what I see is the comment rate and the share rate. So the share rate is higher, the comment rate is higher than other pieces of content. And that’s actually also available. There’s a view within the Facebook business suite where you can see each one of your posts. And I forget what they call it, but it’s like the virality measure and it’s either like negative 0.5 or it’s like 1.8 and it will show you all of your content. And if the reach of it has been expanded or decreased based on the performance of that piece of content. There’s so many interesting things within the Facebook Meta, whatever they call it, business suite.

Emily Walker: Meta Business Suite, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Meta Business Suite, but you really kind of have to click around and spend some time with it. But I think the important takeaway here is these algorithms are important to understand and important to inform how you are creating your content, but to not try and hack the algorithm by saying, okay, I’m going to ask everybody to comment in order to win a free pan. And then if I get a bunch of comments, then a lot of people will see it. That might be true. But as it talks about, Facebook catches up with those things pretty quick or any platform really. But to think instead, what is a piece of content that I could create that would naturally want people to share or get people to share or get people to comment? And then once they do, to your point, Emily, actually comment back and engage with them. So a lot of really great takeaways. One of the things that’s interesting to think about is they talked about this idea of the three types of content, connected content, recommended content and ads. We all know what ads are. It’s like you pay to get in front of people. There’s the connected content, which is what you were talking about before, which is like you follow somebody and you see their content because you’re connected to them. It’s a page or a friend. And then the recommended content, which on all of these platforms is becoming more and more prevalent, which is like you don’t follow that person. You haven’t become a friend with that person or followed that page, but you are seeing that content because Facebook knows that it’s sticky, that you might be interested in it and so that it recommends it. So anything else on this article that would be good to talk through?

Emily Walker: I mean, just a kind of last point that with Pinch of Yum’s Facebook accountant posting these reels that we’ll take a reel, we’ll post the same reel several times and it performs differently every time. Obviously we’re changing the caption, but there’s a science to this and then there’s also just something you can’t control. And yeah, as much as we know about these algorithms, a lot of it is out of our hand.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I do think there’s something to be said about the more reps you get, the more intuition you get around what will work well and what won’t work well. And so part of it is just doing it, showing up, continually creating, even just looking at the data to understand, okay, this did well, why do we think that is? Let’s form a theory, maybe test it again. And so part of it too is reps, I think, in getting through it, posting multiple times. So these are great. Emily, really appreciate you and Ann, all the time that you put into putting these together, and it’s fun to be able to talk through these on the podcast. If people want to sign up for the email, how do they do that?

Emily Walker: Just head to foodbloggerpro.com. You can sign up for the newsletter on the homepage, or if you’re listening to this podcast episode and head to the show notes, you can sign up to be notified of all these things in your email there.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Thanks, Emily. Thanks everybody for listening. And we’ll be back here next week with a new episode and next month with another news roundup.

Emily Walker: That’s right. See you then.

Emily Walker: Hello there, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro. We have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business. You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.