How Food Dolls Turned Facebook Into Their Top Traffic Source

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. We are really excited about this week’s podcast episode. Bjork is chatting with Alia and Radwa Elkaffas, the sisters behind the Food Dolls. They joined Bjork on the podcast to discuss how they built a thriving food business with a Facebook first strategy. With over 5 million followers on Facebook, food Dolls has become a case study in adapting to platforms, navigating algorithm changes in continuously evolving content format. In this episode, Alia and Radwa share how they got started, how they divide responsibilities today, and how they think about analytics, monetization, recipe development, and platform specific strategies in 2026, whether you’re just getting started on Facebook or looking to rethink your traffic mix, this episode is filled with actionable insights and tips to get you started on the right foot. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Here we are. This is a fun interview because we don’t have one expert. We have two experts. Alia and Radwa, so good to have you on the podcast. We met maybe a couple of years ago, and the vision that I have was outside Fit Foodie Finds had just launched this food truck. We were there and we connected, and Lindsay was like, she’s like, they are like the queens of video content and growth on social media. You have over 5 million followers on Facebook, millions of followers on the other platforms, so you guys know what you’re doing. But take us back to when things got started. Did you know that when you set out doing this, that you wanted to create content on social media platforms and grow a following there? Is that kind of how it started when you paired up and said, let’s start this business together?

Radwa Elkaffas: It’s actually really funny because we were both, at the time, we just had babies and we were stay home moms and we started, we always chatted on the phone. That was always our thing, and one day we were so intrigued by all these food videos on social media, and so we’re like, Hey, we should just create food videos. We had no direction. We had no idea what we wanted to do. And funny thing is, is we actually started off our brand called Clean Eats, and then six months later we rebranded to Food Dolls and we were really just trying to figure out what we were going to do. We knew we wanted to do this as a business. Did we understand it? We had no idea. We went in completely blindly. We just knew that we wanted to create videos and easy recipes for people. We did a little food porn for a while and that kind of didn’t work. And then after

Bjork Ostrom: Meaning like, Hey, you have these beautiful images of a recipe, or you have a pizza and it’s like a cheese pull, really beautiful images, it didn’t catch on. And before we get too far away from it, what year was this? When was it that you were starting?

Radwa Elkaffas: We started in 2015 and we rebranded in 2016.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. And what was the reason for the rebrand? Can you talk about that? I just had this conversation with somebody in the Food Blogger Pro forums who was, she actually had, it was the name of a TV show came out after she had started her site and she’s like, oh shoot, I’m trying to think, should I rebrand? Should I not? It’s a hard, you have some momentum, you have the handles, maybe you have a domain. What was the thought process with doing the rebrand?

Radwa Elkaffas: I think we wanted a name that represented us a little bit more. Clean Eats was pretty generic and we felt like Food Dolls was a good transition between food and me and AIA being a duo and as well as some lifestyle. So we wanted the two together, so we just came up with Food Dolls.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Can you talk about what that collaboration was like? Maybe Alia, you can talk a little bit about it In the early stages, how did you figure out who’s going to do, how did you figure out what the work looked like? Because part of it is you need to actually create things that get the momentum to build the business, but also there’s this kind of messy startup stage where you’re even trying to figure out how do you make things? What’s the process like and how do you get momentum with creating things, let alone building a following?

Alia Elkaffas: For sure. Well, in the beginning we were just doing everything together. It wasn’t to divide and conquer. We essentially there, we had no following. We were just trying to grow. So we came up with our recipes and our content. We did that together. And the one thing that we didn’t do, we were not in our videos, it was all just overhead at that time. We were just so uncomfortable with the idea of being on camera, so we were just doing it in the basement, like overhead camera and lights. So it was very funny to see the progression of how we started to now. So it wasn’t until we really started our website and really started growing that we were focusing on who’s going to do what task and how we’re going to collaborate on the recipes, or sorry, not collaborate, how we’re going to do the recipes together and recipe develop things. So

Bjork Ostrom: It really is that hard part where you’re trying to figure out how do you create the content? Who’s going to do what, 10 years in? My guess is that’s probably pretty well-defined. There might be some things that you’re still like, Hey, who does this? How do we do that? But it’s almost like you don’t really need to talk about it, you just know who, what does that look like today? How do you share the responsibilities within the business? Maybe Rodwell, you can start by talking about what your role looks like and then what we can do is we can get into talking about some of the specific tactics you’ve used over the last 10 years to grow to millions of followers.

Radwa Elkaffas: Well, we spend most of the day talking on the phone, so a lot of collaboration and a lot of going back and forth about content ideas. I work more on the side of the content strategy. Alia works a lot of the business side of it, but at the end of the day, we still kind of communicate with each other on what exactly we’re doing because sometimes we have really crazy ideas, but we just kind of go back and forth as far as collaborating with each other.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s kind of dynamic. You’re connecting with each other. High fidelity conversations. Great. Alia, you were saying,

Alia Elkaffas: And then I was going to say that, for example, when we have our photo shoots, we also, a photographer comes out, we take pictures and that we do together. Those days are really hefty. When we take pictures of our photographer for the website,

Bjork Ostrom: You’ll do a shoot day and you’ll be documenting multiple recipes, documenting also doing multiple videos,

Radwa Elkaffas: But we like to kind of separate the two.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So you’ll do a photo shoot day and then a recipe? Yeah, video shoot day.

Radwa Elkaffas: So the days that we do all of our lifestyle content, Alia and I will get together, spend the whole day shooting the content together. Sometimes when it’s just overhead, sometimes I’ll just do that and then sometimes she’ll do the overhead at her house if she’s posting on story. We tag team a lot, a lot, a lot.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. That’s great.

Alia Elkaffas: Sometimes it depends on the week. We take things sometimes week by week, so we’re not going to say we’re super organized. We take it one day at a time, one week at a time.

Bjork Ostrom: I think people would be surprised when they see a business like yours, which is massive scale, massive reach. I’ve had enough of these conversations. I think from the outside, people would assume that it’s really with any business, not just content businesses, that it’s this tight because things are well branded, you have lots of content, millions of followers, whatever it might be, but man, behind the scenes, it’s kind of like that duck analogy where it’s like it can be smooth up above, but underneath it’s like all of our feet are moving very quick as we’re trying to figure out day-to-day, week to week, month to month, what does it look like to continue to get content that we’re publishing and evolving dynamics shift. Maybe somebody has more time and then they don’t have as much time in a certain week. And so

I think it’s much more common than people would believe. So talk to me about the landscape of your content business. So you have the site, you’ve referenced the site. I know you have the cookbook, which was a New York Times bestseller as well, and then you have your multiple platforms. How do you think of the most valuable platforms and the most valuable traffic sources? When you look at the content that you’re creating and the places that you’re publishing, if you could rank order that and platforms would be easy, it’s like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, but also I’d be interested to hear how you think about SEO and search optimization being so successful on social. Is that kind of secondary or is that neck and neck with traffic or exposure from some of these social platforms?

Alia Elkaffas: Okay, so this is a very loaded question. So we’d say Facebook is number one driver to the website and TikTok, and I’d say Instagram next, and then TikTok. And TikTok is more, everybody wants to just stay on the platform on TikTok. They don’t like to go to the website, so it’s definitely not the driver to the blog at all. And we’d say that each platform also has different age groups. So Facebook, yeah, they’re usually, they like the recipe, they like to go to the website and Instagram would say Instagram is probably a little bit more, or sorry, a little bit more than TikTok, but not, it doesn’t drive that much traffic to the website. It used to.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. What changed with that with Instagram? Is it just exposure or people

Radwa Elkaffas: Also the algorithm?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Radwa Elkaffas: The algorithm is huge.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk more about that?

Alia Elkaffas: It’s evolving and changing every single day. Even on Facebook, that one being our biggest platform, it changes every single month. I feel like we get hit with some sort of change. Sometimes you could have it where your content gets pushed out, and other times it just totally slows down and it depends on engagement on your videos and it affects the reach. So we always feel like we’re just rolling with the punches.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things I’m interested in is that across all of your platforms, so Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, almost a million followers across these other platforms, you have million followers. One of the things that I would assume is necessary is that you don’t get too discouraged by a changing algorithm. And I was just talking with the Clarity team yesterday, and they’re pulling up some screenshots as we’re thinking about social media, how can we be a tool that ties into social media? And we’re trying to figure out what’s some of the sentiment that exists around social right now. And for a lot of people, it’s just discouraged. I used to be able to do this and now I can’t do that, and that doesn’t feel good to have the most delicious meal you’ve ever had. And then to have saltine crackers, saltine crackers are great, but it doesn’t taste as good after you’ve had the most delicious meal ever. And I think that’s what can sometimes happen with social platforms is that, man, you have a stretch where it’s gangbusters and people are consuming your content and your growing, and then something shifts and that goes away, and that is discouraging. Whether it’s a search algorithm or a social algorithm. What do you do and where do you go in order to figure out how to evolve through that in order to get back to a place where you can grow again? Because you’ve continued to do that across all of these platforms consistently.

Radwa Elkaffas: I think that’s probably one of the hardest parts about our job. It’s never consistent. So I think the one thing that Alia and I always do is we say we kind of have to roll with the punches, keep trying different things, change it up. If something’s not, it was working and now it’s not, we’ll find out another, even if it’s a different revenue stream or if there’s another thing that we have to do, change our video content a little bit. You kind of have to evolve with how people are changing their content as well. So it makes you kind of think a little bit differently when you’re strategizing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Is that process, my guess is it’s experimental, you got to switch it up, you got to try new things. Can you talk to me, Alia about what that’s like to experiment, try new things, and then monitor those? How are you doing that, both the experimentation, my guess is you’re looking at stuff, you’re getting any idea, maybe you have an idea of a unique way that you want to try something, but what does it then look like to track that and to make bets and assumptions based on the performance you’re seeing?

Alia Elkaffas: Well, I think the biggest thing is the analytics. So we’ll try to experiment by maybe changing up the video where we do the end shot in the beginning, or we go straight into the recipe or whether it’s A SMR versus voiceover. So we kind of just play around with the content and whether it’s overhead or side view, and just track the analytics. So if it performs better one way, then we try to just keep going with that style for a while until it changes and then we tried something else.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you ever use the AB testing within Facebook?

Alia Elkaffas: Yeah, I didn’t have any luck with that. I tried and I tried playing around with it, and I felt like it almost made the videos not perform as good.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Alia Elkaffas: Overall. Overall, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Maybe it was detrimental to the performance of the video, even though you’re getting data on it. Can you talk about what data you are looking at? You log into the meta business suite and then you have, it’s actually pretty amazing when you get into it to see all of the different content like metrics that you have, but what does that look like for you when you are checking in on the performance? We can talk about Facebook specifically today because I think that’s the one that would be interesting to focus on, but how do you go in and analyze the content that you’ve been posting?

Alia Elkaffas: So we go to business.facebook.com, and then we go to the insights and it’ll give you an overview of all your videos and how much your reach is and who it’s reaching, countries, and then you could actually do a breakdown of every single piece of content that you have.

Bjork Ostrom: And when you’re looking at the breakdown of that content, the I’m looking at, so I have pinch of Yums pulled up right now. There’s a content area, so I click on content. I see, okay. We have this over the top, crunchy, bubbly, cheesy, I don’t know what it is. It gets cut off there, but sounds good. But you’re able to see date published views, reach viewers, interactions, likes, and reach. Is there something specifically that you would most lean into shares, saves you would most lean into as the important metric to look at when you’re judging if something is successful or not?

Alia Elkaffas: Yes. It’s shares, saves and engagement a hundred percent. Because if something doesn’t get shared as much or saved as much, then it just doesn’t perform as good.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Alia Elkaffas: So those are the

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Alia Elkaffas: Ones for us for

Radwa Elkaffas: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Radwa Elkaffas: And also seeing it go to the website as well, how many people are clicking on the recipe, and that gives us a good metric as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and we were talking, actually, the idea to have a conversation with you came from conversation we had with Lexi from Crowded Kitchen, and she just sung your praises. One of the changes we made was, Hey, we’re going to start putting the comment, the link as a comment, as an example. So that would be where traffic would be coming from on Facebook would be people seeing the content. Content, and then from that content, they’re looking in the comments, seeing the comment that you’ve left and then clicking on that and coming to your site.

Alia Elkaffas: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Alia Elkaffas: So basically, if you put the link in the caption itself, the videos just don’t perform as good, whether it’s video or actually a still image, it just will not perform good. So you have to put it in the comment section.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Alia Elkaffas: And I think for our followers, they’re kind of trained. They know to go to the comment section to find the link, or if they comment recipe, we use a third party app and then which sends ’em the recipe,

Bjork Ostrom: And so they would know. They could do either. Are you including a prompt to comment recipe? So

Alia Elkaffas: In the comments? Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: So in the comments. Oh, in the comments. I see.

Alia Elkaffas: Yep. We’ll put the link and we’ll say, if you want the recipe sent to your DM, just so you could save it for later comment recipe below.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Alia Elkaffas: We still don’t put that part in the caption. We keep the caption very minimal,

Bjork Ostrom: Very simple. One sentence, I see that you’re also using hashtags. Can you talk a little bit about that and kind of what your theory is with including hashtags and content?

Alia Elkaffas: So that’s actually very new. So Facebook just started at having the hashtags and wanting creators to start using ’em.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.

Alia Elkaffas: So you have this page where you could get creator tips and tricks, and that’s on there to use some hashtags.

Bjork Ostrom: Is that the Facebook, Facebook for creators page? Is that what you’re talking about? Yeah. Can you talk for those who aren’t familiar? I just came across this recently. It’s like, oh, this is super helpful information because we’re creators on Facebook, and it’s essentially a little bit of a portal into Facebook to say, here’s what this is, Facebook saying this, here’s what we view as best practice. Is that more or less what’s happening there?

Alia Elkaffas: Yes, correct. And I just do this straight from the phone. You go in there and it’ll give you all the tips and tricks. It’ll tell you which videos from other creators have performed well, and it’ll just kind of give you a breakdown of what to look for and add hashtags and what to include and best practices, what to not include, and not putting a link in the caption is also one of ’em that they recommend not doing.

Bjork Ostrom: Would there be other ones that you would point out as you’re going across Facebook and you’re seeing other people’s content, my guess is that you have this filter, this best practice filter, and maybe some of the common issues that you see creators, food or not creators making that you’d say, oh, if they change this, I know that they would maybe have videos that performed better.

Alia Elkaffas: Yep, definitely the link. And then also engaging some creator jus just post the poster contents and not engage and engaging is a huge piece. And also how much the cadence, how much you’re posting every day is also huge. So Facebook is just one of those platforms where you could just dump content, you literally just post, even if you’ve posted it before, you just continue to post.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have a posting frequency that you try and hit?

Alia Elkaffas: Yes, we post every two hours.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Like 24 hours a day.

Alia Elkaffas: Yes, but we schedule it. So here’s the thing. So a lot of, we post one reel a day, but we also post infeed posts. So here’s the kicker is I think they’re getting rid of the infeed posts.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain what that is? So yeah, for those who aren’t familiar, including myself

Alia Elkaffas: For sure. So before there are reels at all, it was only video and photos. So in feed videos and photos, and then I think it was 2021, then they introduced the reels. So you’d post for us, we still have the ability to post an in feed video.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, right, right.

Alia Elkaffas: So if you’re on your phone, there’ll be a reels tab, but then if you’re on your desktop, you could actually see an videos tab.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, everything is going to be a reel moving forward. Is that more or less what’s happening? Yeah,

Alia Elkaffas: Correct. So we schedule our INFEED videos for every two hours. Got it. So it’s essentially cross-posting. We’re not posting a new video every two hours. So you go in there and you take your existing video that you’ve done from your library, and you cross post it as a, it looks like a new video, but it’s not. So the views carry over, but then the likes and shares start from scratch.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting. Okay. I don’t think that we have that option. If I think of, does that sound like it might be a possibility that within that it’s not available for some creators or as far as you know, is that okay? Yeah, for whatever reason, you still have, as they’re rolling this out, you still have the ability to do that. But what you’re saying is your belief is eventually that will go away

Alia Elkaffas: And then it’ll just be reels. And at that point, we’re hoping that people will be able to cross post reels. We don’t know, like you said, the landscape’s always changing. You just never know what they’re going to take away or what they’re going to add.

Bjork Ostrom: I think how it works for us right now with reels, lemme know if this sounds right, is if we are posting the same type of content, like we did this around Christmas, had a cookie recipe that did well, we just have to post it then as a brand new reel. So it’s like six weeks later we post it again. What you’re saying right now is you can go into your library, pull that forward, the views stack, but you were saying the saves and the likes are new, start from scratch, and eventually, unless they shift in the other direction, Facebook, eventually your thought is that will go away for you. So then at that point, would you say you would just be posting new real content? If it was a duplicate, you would just post it again?

Alia Elkaffas: Exactly. Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Alia Elkaffas: And I think you could schedule reels, but then the problem with that is if we want to schedule our menu chat, so that’s where you cannot schedule a reel on a third party app to send out the recipe. So we’d have to manually go in there and put a link in the comments or schedule the comments essentially,

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I’d be interested in your mindset, Radwa, as you think of recipe development and as you think of strategies around what type of content you’re going to be creating, if you are somebody who is SEO Forward, you’re doing keyword research, you’re thinking about potentially maybe not as much anymore, but thinking about keyword density, how often are people searching a thing? Can I rank for this on Google? What I’ve found with a lot of the people who are social forward is that you actually approach it in a much different way, which is how do I create something that’s visually appealing, that will have a hook, that will be interesting for somebody when they look at it and people might not be searching for it at all, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable. It’s just a different way to approach content creation. Can you talk about how you think of recipe development paired with strategy around exposure, social media platforms, and then SEO, how that all mixes together?

Radwa Elkaffas: That’s a great question because at first, when we first started, we were not paying attention to SEO at all. And then we started paying attention to SEO, and then now we’re kind of like, okay, so what we have found to be so true is people really love easy recipes. They just want something super easy, super quick, even if it’s two ingredients, three ingredients are how fast can I get dinner on the table? And so we kind of have to sometimes wheel ourselves back in to that point of how easy can we make this recipe? And I think that’s what people want, is they want that easy recipe. They don’t want this 50 ingredients lavish meal. They want the easy recipe because they want to get dinner on the table. And so I feel like sometimes we just always have to take a pause and not focus so much on SEO, especially nowadays.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And so when you are thinking about content, how do you approach it? What are the filtering mechanisms for will we do this or will we not? For example, one of them might be, Hey, let’s think of something that would be a recipe that would be really visually fun, and then letting that lead versus, Hey, this is a recipe I’m super excited about. How do I make this recipe really visually appealing and work well for video?

Radwa Elkaffas: Sometimes we don’t really necessarily have a strategy on the content. We just go back and forth about trying to create a recipe. So sometimes it’s very spontaneous and sometimes it doesn’t make any sense, and they’re like, hold on. I think we might actually be onto something. And then we just try it and then we’re like, okay, either it really worked or it really didn’t, or we know that people love, certain people love chia pudding. Okay, let’s try different flavors. And it could be essentially almost the same exact recipe, but they’re loving that there’s different flavors.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things I’m noticing, even in me asking the question was framing it up with the assumption that it’s video based. And I think the reason is because, okay, there’s TikTok, there’s Instagram, these are real REEL, video-based type platforms that obviously performs well on Facebook, but what does your content mix look like on Facebook? My guest is video is an important component of it, but how often are you also publishing just photos or even text-based content? What does the media mix look like when you’re posting on Facebook, those 12 posts a day?

Alia Elkaffas: So we try to post a reel, an image, one still image, and then the rest just in feed videos. But text, we played around with it a little bit, but it doesn’t usually perform very good. We don’t get a lot of engagement on it, so we kind of stopped that, but honestly, you just have to experiment and try. There’s a while where the images were doing so well, it was getting pushed out, so we were pushing out more images than videos, and then we just shifted once that kind of the engagements on those dropped. So you kind just have to roll with what you’re seeing on the platform and what’s performing good and what’s not.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, one of the things we talk about is this idea of figuring out a wave and then being a surfer on that wave. And I think the wave can exist as a general focus. And in the world of food, it could be a way that people are eating type of food and people will talk. Protein is the obvious example right now. Let’s like protein cereal and protein brownies, and it’s like protein, everything. And if you are a high protein food creator or a food creator that has flexibility in what you’re talking about and you shift a high protein, you’re shifting to ride a wave. I think that also exists in platforms where there are certain platforms that are doing that are easier to create on. A really obvious example is like we are not doing interviews on MySpace. That’s not a platform that people are building a huge following on. What have you noticed in terms of the platform that you feel like is the best wave to ride and then the medium on that platform that is performing best? So it’d really be dwindling it down to the platform and then the medium on that platform. Would you be able to pinpoint one? So

Alia Elkaffas: We guess, or we’d say that Facebook, you could pretty much, we think that meals perform the best on Facebook. Correct. So it’s whether it’s like breakfast, lunch, dinner, just meals, TikTok and Instagram are more like tips, tricks, short little clips of videos perform better. But I think just overall using Facebook as a good tool to see how things perform there kind of helps give a good basis on how they will perform on other platforms. It does not do well on Facebook. It’s likely not going to do well on other platforms. That’s how it’s been for us.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you make a decision then to post or not post based on Facebook? Can you talk about that Rodwell, what that looks like?

Radwa Elkaffas: Well, I think we just see, well, once we post it on Facebook, it kind of determines are we going to post this on Instagram? Did this do well enough that we think it will perform well on Instagram? And sometimes it’s a shorter version of the video that we put for Facebook. So let’s say the video that we put on Facebook was 30 to 40 seconds. We sometimes will cut it in half and post that on Instagram.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Interesting. It’s one of the things that, so I’ve been thinking about this idea that we essentially have, so we have all these different platforms, and there’s this tool that I really love, which is called Monarch. It’s like a personal budget tool. We love that.

Okay. Do you use Monarch? Are you familiar with it? Okay. It’s awesome. It’s a great tool, and I’ve been thinking about what is the Monarch equivalent for creators, where we have all of these different accounts, we have all of these different platforms, and what we are doing is we are making deposits into those platforms, and then we are tracking the performance of those. And really what we have is a portfolio. That portfolio is inherently valuable. Facebook makes money, traffic to your website, makes money on Instagram. You can get payouts for bonuses and stuff, but you can work with sponsors. You can sell a product that is valuable. And one of the things that we need to do as a creator isn’t just think about how do we create good content, but then when we are making these deposits into these different platforms, how are we doing so strategically in order to maximize the value?

And that’s what I hear you saying is being strategic about that. What does the actual distribution process look like for you, or the planning process? Pinch of Yum maybe has, I’m just guessing 600 videos. They’re 580 of them are probably Evergreen, maybe seasonal, but Evergreen. We could probably be posting one to two pieces of content a day on all these different platforms, but we don’t, and I think it’s because Facebook, we’re getting better at it, but we just don’t have a good process right now for scheduling, for making decisions around that, for revisiting older content, resurfacing it. It’s pretty organic. But do you have a process for at the beginning of the month, let’s schedule everything out, or is it like, Hey, we ran through our queue on Instagram. Let’s jump on the phone real quick and figure out what’s coming up next. What does that process look like for you to make sure that the queues on all of your platform are always full?

Alia Elkaffas: So basically on Facebook, we post one new video a day, and everything else is essentially cross-post or reposting them. And then we’ll do that on Facebook and then on Instagram, we try to post one video every day, but we’ve kind of scaled back a little, trying to post maybe four new videos a week. And same with TikTok, and I’d say Facebook is probably the easiest. You could schedule it, schedule it out, and I mean, we could schedule far out, but it’s actually, it’s kind of daunting to sit and schedule a week at a time. So I’ll do two days at a time where I’ll schedule all the posts and then schedule the ManyChat for them as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And are you doing the Instagram and TikTok live posting in the middle of the day?

Alia Elkaffas: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Not scheduling those?

Alia Elkaffas: Nope. And then we have somebody that helps us with Pinterest. So she posts all the P Pinterest content and use Snapchat, but that’s kind of on the back burner. And YouTube is also, we post maybe three, four times a week on that as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, the really interesting thing with Facebook is that 6, 8, 10, 12 times a day, it’s a platform where you can post that frequent. The other interesting thing is you can then continually and consistently, as the program works right now, earn money from that content on the platform itself from Facebook, but then also it’s one of the better platforms for sending traffic, which then you can earn money from that as well. So can you talk about, for those who aren’t familiar, the Facebook content monetization program, I think is what it’s called that’s evolved over the last year into something that’s a little bit different. It used to be more split out where you’d have categories and you could earn from images or reels, and now it’s just one big program and you might make money from it. Can you talk about how that works and maybe your experience as creators in trying to maximize the value that you’re getting from the content that you’re creating through that program?

Alia Elkaffas: Sure. Yeah. They’ve changed their monetization program several times. So for the longest time, it was just in feed ads and ads on reels. That was the biggest way to monetize. And then once reels came out, then they started with bonus program, and that was, they were really pushing creators to start posting their reels. They were getting people on Instagram to post from Instagram to Facebook, just so they could get paid on those. But now it’s all lumped into one, so the better your content performs, essentially, the more you get paid. So it’s more of a just based off of your views, engagement and shares, likes all that.

Bjork Ostrom: But sometimes you can also have something that performs well and then just doesn’t earn. I’m looking at, I haven’t dug into this as to why we had a, this was a vegetarian shepherd’s pie on pinch, and it had a quarter of a million views, and it earned $0, which it’s so hard to predict. It’s like, well, you can’t predict it. There is no, it seemingly is no kind of formula with it. Whereas we had another piece of content that had, let’s see, a million views and earn $40 from that. Yeah, go ahead.

Alia Elkaffas: I was going to say that first video, how long was it?

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, that’s a good question. It was, it might’ve been too short. Is that what you were going to say?

Alia Elkaffas: Yeah, because if it’s less than 15 seconds, you won’t get paid anything on it.

Bjork Ostrom: The video itself?

Alia Elkaffas: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I don’t need to spend too much time troubleshooting it. This is going to just be you guys consulting on our Facebook account views over, yep, that’s what it was. It was 14 seconds. Oh, no, we were so close. So you knew. So it’s almost as if you’ve done this before. Yeah, so that was the issue with that. Otherwise, it probably would’ve earned something. As I scroll through, I can see,

Radwa Elkaffas: Just take that video and create one more second on it, and then,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly. We’ll add our logo onto the back of it, but it actually is a good point where if we’re ever uploading something that is, especially in this case, 14 seconds, literally if we just extended out a second, suddenly it would be eligible for earnings. Yeah. So can you talk about, if you’re getting onto Facebook, you’re starting to create content, how would you help level set expectations as to earning income from Facebook, and would you think of it as like, Hey, it’s kind of nice to get a little bit here, but really the value is the traffic potential, or it’s going to kind of ebb and flow? It really depends on the month. Some months might be better than others. Just to kind of set expectations for other creators who are thinking about investing more into Facebook,

Radwa Elkaffas: Keep posting, keep posting everything and anything at all times, and just keep trying different things and try posting reels. Try posting as much as you can, and with all the content that you have, because a lot of these creators have all the content. It’s there. It’s been building up for years, so the strategy is just post and start there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you help rad break down the maybe fear that people would have around posting a lot and the perception that, Hey, if people follow me and I post a lot, they’re going to be annoyed or they’re going to think that, can you help people who are maybe in that position of having some fear around posting frequency, specifically on Facebook?

Radwa Elkaffas: We totally understand that. How we felt in the beginning we’re like, oh my gosh, this is too much. But Facebook is just its own beast. It’s totally different than any other platform. So you can do all this posting and you don’t really flood people’s feed Instagram or TikTok. It’s completely different. So don’t be scared. Just do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s such a different algorithm where this is true for all the social platforms, but I feel like it’s especially true for Facebook where if you rewind to when we first started in the 2010s, you had early, especially 2010s, you had these social platforms that were mostly chronological, and you would post something and then you’d log in, and then you would see a list of all of the stuff that your friends and the pages that you followed posted in chronological order, and you scroll through it, and then you eventually get to the end. You’re like, okay, now I see this other post that I saw yesterday, and I know I’m at the end. And Facebook, I think, was the first platform to start to do algorithmic surfacing of content where if something got a lot of engagement, Hey, it’s a birthday announcement, we want to make sure that people see this.

Then it shows up at the top. Obviously a ton of implications for that in terms of what people are then seeing, you’re seeing the things that are most engaging. Oftentimes what that can be in a worst case scenario is that it can be things that are triggering or upsetting, or a lot of people are commenting because they’re angry at each other. In the world of food though, what it means is like you are creating a piece of content that is engaging that people save, that they share because they want to keep it. They’re interested in holding onto it, or they want to share it with the spouse or a friend, or they just watch it all the way through because it’s good content. With that in mind, do you have any advice for people to create or even ways that you can position your content that encourage somebody to do those things that you said were important, engage with it to comment on it, to save it, to share it? Some examples might be at the end of a video, you could say, smash that like button. My guess is that’s not what you’re going to say, but what would be some ways that people might be able to think strategically without being over the top in encouraging those variables that are important for the algorithm?

Radwa Elkaffas: That’s a good question.

Alia Elkaffas: I know that’s a good

Radwa Elkaffas: Question. I know. I don’t even know what I would say because I feel like try everything and anything. Sometimes we shy away from trying new things and trying to change it up. We get scared and we sit and argue back and forth, should we do it, should we not? But sometimes just trying something opens a door that you just didn’t even think that would be open, so just try it all. It doesn’t hurt. Right. It won’t hurt

Alia Elkaffas: To try. One of the, and I think the biggest, sorry. I was going to say other thing that with content creation, getting engagement, and I know it’s not exactly the best, but when you do something in the video that people will engage about, if you used a cool tool or you did a method that somebody didn’t know about, then it kind of starts that engagement. People start commenting, oh, what did you do here? What is that? Or, why did you use this? Or if they don’t like it, or if they don’t like it. Yeah. Fortunately, even the bad comments, get engagement and get people talking.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m trying to remember who this was, if this was Lindsay or somebody that I interviewed, but they were talking about, it’s just a very foggy memory. They were talking about they had a bandaid when they were doing, something happened where they cut their finger and they had just a ton of engagement on it, but it was like because they were doing this food video and had a bandaid, but that as an example, not that it’s like some tactic, but I think what I’d be curious with is are there ways that you can do that in a way that is organic, natural, that isn’t forced, but that also allows you to have some type of multiplier on the content that you’re creating? The one that I’ve thought about that it is not a good idea, but it’s in the category of what I’m trying to think about is if you create a piece of content that is indulgent, maybe it’s like a dessert. It’s having some type of call to action to people around take a friend, you want to make this for you, something like that. But I think that at its extreme, it doesn’t work. But do you ever do any type of call to action like that other than including the link or comment for the recipe?

Alia Elkaffas: No. We usually don’t. Sometimes we’ll say at the end of our voiceover, be sure to follow us for more of our easy recipes, or let us know what you want to see next. Just things like that. But generally, we don’t do any strong call to actions.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you see people, I think the

Alia Elkaffas: One thing has

Radwa Elkaffas: Been, sorry, but the one thing that we did start doing that we’ve been doing for a while is just doing different series. We have an Egyptian meal series, or we have our Dish, the dishes series or one pan meals and people like that. Then they kind of follow along with that series. We haven’t done one that every day we show from the same series. We kind of have a few different ones.

Bjork Ostrom: The idea with that is naturally people will want to follow along with something if they know there’s going to be more of that coming down the line, Hey, we’re doing this specific thing that might encourage people to join in and be a part of it and follow along. That’s great. So you had said you’re posting one new video a day. Is that like 365 new videos a year?

Alia Elkaffas: Yes. So here’s what we’ve learned is essentially when we have one cut of a video, we’ll make several cuts. So like I said, we’re end is in the beginning, or one with voiceover, one without voiceover, or we just do a quick edit. Maybe it’s just the ending of the video where it’s just the, I guess if you want to call it the beauty shot, the hero shot, little clips of that, so that way you can kind of maximize your contents and get so many different cuts off of one.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s so smart, and I think that not enough people are viewing. The analogy that I use is the music world. Musicians have one song that they’re writing, and if they think it’s a hit or if they figure out it’s a hit because people are reposting it on social, they are cutting that up. They’re remixing it. They’re posting a hundred times about it, and I think in the recipe world, we’re pretty quick to move on from at least I would say for what we’re doing, we view it kind of as a singular recipe. We have a singular video probably that will go to multiple platforms. But what you’re saying is actually, there could probably be six, seven different versions of

Radwa Elkaffas: The one recipe.

Bjork Ostrom: The one recipe. Can you talk more about the, is that just in your head, Hey, we’re going to create all of these different versions from this, or do you have a little cheat sheet that you make sure that you check off for each one? Or what does that look like?

Radwa Elkaffas: I wish I could tell you that we’re organized in that space, but we’re not. At least we have an organized pantry and an organized spice rack. But when it comes to content, it’s not organized. It’s very disorganized, and we weren’t organized at all.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think that it’s a strategy and it’s like Is the strategy documented? No, because it probably doesn’t need to be, but it’s organized in the sense that you just talked about what the process is. Can you recap again? I think people would be interested in hearing that the different types that you think about creating, and then maybe at a high level where those end up. Is that mostly Facebook that you’re thinking about posting the seven different versions too?

Radwa Elkaffas: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely not for Instagram, we would do that. It would just be for Facebook, and sometimes it’s just trying, taking certain clips from the beginning, let’s say, even if it’s in the middle of the video, and we put that in the beginning and shorten it, and you can really take your one minute clip and create so many different versions of it and try different things. And sometimes we could do it with some videos, and other times we really can’t. You just can’t.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And are you doing the editing or do you work with the editor? Okay. Do you both do editing?

Radwa Elkaffas: No, I do. Okay.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s your world. Do you use a final Cloud or Premier Pro, or what are you using for it?

Radwa Elkaffas: I use InShot. I used to use Premiere.

Bjork Ostrom: Are you doing it on your phone?

Radwa Elkaffas: Yes, now I am. Yeah. It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Amazing. I think that is so cool that we live in a world where you can build millions of followers, and then you’re shooting on your phone as well.

Radwa Elkaffas: Yeah, yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s amazing. And so from InShot, you’ll go in, you’ll remix it, you’ll create a different version. You’ll create this title or this ending slide or ending section is now at the beginning, and then scheduling that to Facebook. This is now getting really into the weeds, but I’m super curious. Where do you store those? Do you have them in a shared iCloud library?

Radwa Elkaffas: This is part of the disorganized.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. This is me coming into your house and opening all your drawers.

Radwa Elkaffas: Yeah, no, you’ll find that organized, but

Bjork Ostrom: This is okay. This is not digital, not

Radwa Elkaffas: So we use Dropbox a lot, and I know Alia’s trying to hold her laugh in because I know she’s dying because of yesterday we were trying to sync, literally just sync our phones together and it just wasn’t working. So we can airdrop it. So sometimes we airdrop Dropbox. We started using just the shared folder on our iCloud, and that wasn’t working, but mainly Dropbox and Airdrop.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. I love it. I think it’s scrappy and working. It’s both of those things. And I think the thing is, it can be that when you are working in the way that you’re working, and one of the things that’s great about that is you guys have a good relationship. You work well together, and you don’t need to over-engineer a thing as long as it’s working. Exactly. Which it’s a process that you’ve figured out and have used to scale to reach multiple millions of people, which is amazing. So can you talk about, let’s say somebody’s wanting to get started, maybe a little bit intimidated by the process. What does that look like to get started with, we will talk about Facebook specifically to get started with Facebook to get some traction. What would your advice be to them? And maybe you could each go, rod, while you can start,

Radwa Elkaffas: Just start posting contents. Literally just post anything and everything and just kind of, also, you got to put your heart into it, right? You got to see what will probably resonate with you, will resonate with other people, but you just got to be consistent. Consistency is key.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Alia Elkaffas: And I’d say the biggest thing is, so if somebody has no following on Facebook, but they have a following on Instagram, start by sharing all of your Instagram to your Crossposting it from your Instagram directly to your Facebook, because kind of an easy way to just push it out. And then once you start getting a following on Facebook, then natively upload on Facebook because Facebook wants you to post directly on there versus cross-posting. But the cross-posting is a great way just to get started.

Bjork Ostrom: Cross-posting from Instagram,

Alia Elkaffas: You could turn on that setting on Instagram where it just pushes it out straight to Facebook page

Bjork Ostrom: If you’re posting a reel or

Alia Elkaffas: Something, stories.

Bjork Ostrom: And you would say stories, ideally native to Facebook as well.

Alia Elkaffas: So Facebook wants you to do everything natively.

Bjork Ostrom: Natively just because

Alia Elkaffas: Their tools are different. Everything they want you to use their features versus using Instagram. But if you just don’t have the time, just start by having it. Share it from to Facebook. That’s the easiest way. And then if you have a following already on Facebook, just directly upload, directly, upload and upload as many times you can and day.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I love that. Super fun to talk to you both. Fun that you’re in Minnesota. Go twins. Thank having us. Really appreciate your insights and continued success in all that you’re doing. To close out, do you want to talk about where people can follow along with you and also talk about where they could pick up your cookbook, which I know you released, it was end of 2024 now, but still in that kind of newish category. So can you talk about that a little bit real quick as we close out, and then where obviously people can follow you across all social platforms.

Radwa Elkaffas: So of course you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok interest. I don’t think we left any social media platform,

Alia Elkaffas: Have we a, I know we’re Food dolls everywhere across the board and our website’s. Food dolls.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Radwa Elkaffas: Thank

Alia Elkaffas: You both. And you can catch our

Bjork Ostrom: Cookbook. Oh yeah, the book, our

Radwa Elkaffas: Website. Yeah. Cookbook is on our website. It’s called Pretty Delicious.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it. This was awesome. Thank you both for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Radwa Elkaffas: Thank you. Thank you. Have a good one. Thanks for having us. Bye.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. If you enjoyed it, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. We’ll be back next week with another episode of the podcast. Bjork is interviewing Rachel Kirk from The Laughing Spatula. That’s it for us this week. Hope you tune in next week, and in the meantime, make it a wonderful week.