How to Grow Your Food Instagram

Instagram is tough because there is hardly any information on how to grow your following and there is almost no information on how to grow a food blog. I used to get frustrated because it seems like every food blogger with a large following says to just not worry about getting followers. This is something I do not agree with.

Once I started becoming more intentional with my content and treating my account like a business I started to see growth on my account. In about 6 months I managed to grow my account to over 10,000 followers. It takes a lot of hard work to grow your food instagram - but the hard work definitely pays off.

These are my top tips to grow your food blog:

1. Post consistently: I found that I didn't start seeing growth until I started posting 5+ days a week. Currently I post 7 days a week and it has helped my engagement a lot.
2. Post high quality content: Take your pictures in natural light, invest in some nice dishes and props, use lightroom. People are more likely to engage with a pretty photo
3. Engage, engage, engage: I can not say this enough, engage with your community. Find other food accounts and like and comment their photos. They will be more likely to engage with your content and this will boost your engagement.
4. Post reels: Instagram prioritizes reels. My reels on average get twice as many views as my feed posts.
5. Put your recipe in your photo caption: This makes people more likely to save your photo which boosts engagement.
6. Hashtags: Make sure to use hashtags, I use between 20-30 tags that have from 10-150k posts attached to them. If you use too common of hashtags (ie #chocolate) your post will get lost.
7. Post unique but simple recipes: If you only post recipes with 50 ingredients that take hours to make, people aren't likely to save your content and try your recipes. On the opposite end if you only post avocado toast or basic oatmeal your recipes won't stand out.

I am no expert but these are the hacks I used, and will continue to use to grow my account. Although all of these strategies work, make sure you're posting about what you love! I truly love creating vegan recipes so I never feel burnt out. When you're passionate about what you're posting that will shine through and people will be attracted to your feed.

Building a following takes time, but it is possible with hard work.