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

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast this week on the podcast we are welcoming Lexi Harrison from the food blog Crowded Kitchen. Lexi and her mom first started sharing food content on instagram back in 2015 and what began as a fun creative outlet for the two of them has now turned into a thriving multi platform business with over 5 million followers across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. In this podcast episode, Lexi shares more about how they strategically grew their audience, refine their content approach and learn to make social media work for their business. Lexi and Bjork chat about the benefits of prioritizing social media growth and for Crowded Kitchen, focusing on building their social media following has paid off significantly. Their social media traffic now surpasses their organic website traffic and they're earning 4 to $6,000 per week just through the Facebook monetization program. On top of that, their larger audience has allowed them to secure higher paying brand partnerships and even land a cookbook deal. Lexi walks listeners through exactly how they changed their Facebook strategy, including their posting cadence, how they recycle content, and how they've managed this extraordinary growth with just 200 short form videos to work with. In this interview, Lexi explains exactly how they got from 30,000 followers on Facebook in April of 2024 to over 2.4 million followers on Facebook. Now I know I learned a lot of great strategies in this interview and I think you will as so I'm just going to let Bjork take it away.

Lexi, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

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

Yes. Yeah.

And. And the focus for that is maybe like rank ordered Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Would you that be kind of how you view the important platforms that you've built on?

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

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

Absolutely. So I guess just as a little background to help you understand our business, because I think we were kind of in a unique position when we started. We started back in 2018. Well, technically in like 2015, we had a different name, Superfood Runner.

Okay.

Back in Instagram was a very different place back.

So this was Instagram that you're talking about when you're saying having different names. Yep.

We started our business exclusively on Instagram. So.

And it was you and your mom to start.

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

Love it. What did you. What were your events?

Long distance. So.

Okay.

Mostly.

Bless you. That's. I did the. I did the 800, which I don't think. Is, Is that like mid distance? Yeah, for like two years. It was like seventh and eighth grade. It was a miserable race to run. Oh, it was miserable.

That was my husband's specialty event.

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

Yep.

And that was just you at that point.

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

Sure. At the time it's like, it's like running adjacent. Like food that you might eat if you're somebody who runs a lot.

Yeah, yeah. I went to a really small school, so I didn't have, you know, I wasn't able to cook for myself. It was only nine, so it was just, you know, trying to. I don't even know. We had no strategy.

You were posting content and just kind of exploring and learning the smoothie bowl era, you know. Yeah, yeah.

So she joined on and we've been doing it together ever since then. My first job out of college was actually with the Feed Feed back when they were a very small startup. And I worked there for a year and really started doing all of their social media content, all of their videography and photography for their brand campaigns. And after a year there, we were still, still running Superfood Runner on the side and realized that I wanted to take that full time with my mom. So I moved back home to Michigan and we rebranded to Crowded Kitchen that fall, which was 2017. And we've been doing this together ever since. So we really exclusively started on Instagram. And because, you know, that was such a different time in the Instagram world. It's like you could post a colorful smoothie bowl, no recipe.

Yeah.

One photo. You could do it in 10 minutes and get, I don't know, 10,000 likes or something like 3,000 followers. So we actually were able to grow our social media account pretty well. I think we surpassed a hundred K within the first year of doing it. Seriously?

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

Definitely we, I feel like I had a better sense too of what, you know, what I should be paid. So we weren't. Of course we were doing some stuff for free back then because. Yep, you know, that was the time.

That's what you do.

Yeah, we at least were getting paid better than, you know, if I had just been going off of my gut instinct, I probably would have charged like $50 or something at the time. So that helped for sure. But another important part of our business that's actually been a really important part since the start has been freelance content creation. So I did have one client that I was doing long term content creation for and actually doing some like social media consulting for. So we had always had that as like a backup. And that's actually continued to be a really big part of our. It's grown actually over the years. So.

And still today is which we. It'll be interesting to talk about that.

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

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

That was. That was it. There were no. There was no blog income. There was no, you know, Facebook, none of these other sources. So it was, like, very. So we actually did a ton of content creation for brands at that point, because that was what was making us a lot of money.

And so.

And these would. These were for brands, not for other creators.

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

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

Yeah, mostly. I mean, back then, reels weren't really a thing, so it was more professional videos. Sure, yeah. Regular images. Of course, they were using them on social media, but also just for ad campaigns. You know, new products, Facebook ads.

So it's like a food agency? Like a food content agency? Yep. Which I think that mindset is helpful. I have a friend who has a video agency. I've talked to him about him. His name is Nate, a few times on the podcast. And it's like, it's. When you're an agency, like, the budget available is just very different. Like, brands are willing to pay if they're going to use something as a, you know, paid video campaign that's going to promote their new launch of a new product line. And so it'll be interesting to talk about that a little bit. But continuing on the story arc, my guess is eventually, as you continue to build your social following, you start to think like, hey, maybe there's another opportunity to create a new revenue source, which would be ad income and that. What? At what? And say it again, 2019.

We also just wanted to look more professional because we were like, okay, at this point, if we're going to be selling ourselves as recipe creators, we really need to have a website to go along with this Instagram page because.

Yeah.

And I don't even think we really. I think it was really just Instagram. I mean, TikTok wasn't around at that time. I don't think we really posted on Facebook. It was like literally just Instagram for our own content. So, yeah, we built out an actual WordPress site, I think, in 2019. Um, and then we, we kind of hit a plateau with, with social media. Uh, we created a ton of content. I mean, you know, pandemic. Of course, we created a ton of content between 2020 and 2023 for our own platforms. Um, but like many other creators, we kind of went through this period on social media where, you know, it was a really a different time before 2020 and it was much easier to grow. And of course, the type of content that was performing well was very different. It was pretty much all still images. And then we saw reels come out and we were like many other creators, very resistant to kind of switches.

And we're like, oh, your job changes. Like you have a new job.

Yeah, yeah, Totally new style. You know, we were like, maybe it's just a phase. Like we'll just keep posting photos.

Yeah.

Then they stopped doing well and we stopped growing. And we kind of. Because we have this content creation part of our business, we were like, let's just kind of focus on that and for the brands.

Let's.

Yeah.

Focus on branded partnerships.

Yeah.

And we're like, well, and, and just our, you know, our photography and videography for other.

The agency.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, that's great.

You just gotta figure it out.

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

Yeah, he kind of just took a couple of days, was on the Explore page on Instagram and just took a bunch of notes on what he was seeing on these viral videos. And at that time, I mean, some of these principles are still important for sure, but, you know, it was like lighting, having a little bit more of a lifestyle set up with some plants in the background, versus having, you know, photography backdrop and having it feel like a studio.

You know, close up shots, really quick transitions, interesting recipe concepts. Not necessarily just, you know, what we were doing on our website. And so we came up with a couple of ideas. Our first idea actually was at our wedding in 2018. We had a pretty small wedding, so we did the cocktails and stuff for it. And we did a few cocktails where we infused. We did like a strawberry infused vodka and a jalapeno infused tequila or something, and we made our signature cocktails with those. So we're like, okay, I don't think I've really seen this on social media. Let's post this as a video and let's do a little bit of storytelling. So, you know, the voiceover was like a couple years ago when we got married, we made this strawberry infused vodka. Everyone loved it, blah, blah, blah. And literally that first video went viral. Um, I think it, it was. That was like the craziest feeling watching that.

So fun.

It was so. Yeah, it was insane.

Um, and do you think the. If you were to pinpoint something about it, like, you know, you talked about your husband. What's your husband's name?

Brent.

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

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

But it worked.

Really short. Yeah. Like really quick transitions. Like 0.4 second transitions for every shot and changing the angles a lot. And it was just like, boom, boom, boom, boom. We made this for our wedding. Everyone loves it. It's really cool. It's a fun thing to do with your friends. Really short caption, just explaining how to do it. Didn't have a blog post attached. We were just like, let's just position this as just a social media focused piece of content. And, yeah, it took off. So we continued to use that strategy for the rest of that summer. We focused on. Our thing has kind of always been to focus on produce and seasonal content. So we really just leaned into seasonal produce and tried to think of unique ways to use produce. So I think our next thing that went viral was. It was a sorbet. It was like a strawberry lemonade sorbet served in a lemon half.

So again, going with something that's visually appealing, something where maybe you're looking at the first three seconds and you're not totally sure what it is.

Yeah, it's kind of novel. There's intrigue.

Yeah. You're like, what is. Yeah, you know, how are you making this? What's going into it? That one. We also found out pretty quickly that controversial controversy is a good way to succeed on Instagram.

Talk more about that. Like, what was controversial about it? And then how did that impact things?

Yeah, that one, I guess there's. Which I. I didn't go to. I had no Costco membership at the time, so, like, genuinely had no idea what this was. But I guess there's this brand of sorbets that are served in fruits called, like, Island Way Sorbet, which I now know because people commented about it about 40 million times.

And everyone was like, you're just copying this from Island Way Sorbet. I was like, I'm sure I've never heard of that.

Yeah, Yeah.

I literally got the idea because I've seen videos of people in Italy, like, serving Italian Lemon and a lemon. Like, it's that simple.

But it's this idea that, like, suddenly people were like, commenting, which drove more people to, you know, fed the algorithm and. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

And are you also seeing then from these pieces of content growth with your. So as you're having more pieces of content that are going viral, as you start to say, like, hey, we're going to adjust some of the visual elements, but we're also going to try and get better at storytelling. Maybe we're going to think of things that are, like, unique or novel or interesting.

Those will go more vital from that. You also then have more followers. With more followers, potentially, you'll get more views. And it kind of became a little bit like an upward cycle.

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

Interesting.

And it was going nuts. And our whole thing that summer was we touched on this a little bit in the beginning was like, you know, how do you balance this social media and website and everything else that you have going on? We really took the strategy that summer of we said, screw the rest of the business. We're just gonna focus on social media and see how it goes.

Yeah.

And see if, you know, it's too much to do it all at once. And let's just see if we can hone in on social media, get that going, and then the rest will come later. So we were not doing anything attached to our blog at that point. Every. All the recipes were in the Caption.

This was 2023.

2023.

Yeah.

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

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

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

Yeah, it was great.

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

Yes. So back then we had a very specific formula and I'll actually talk more about our series that really took off. So in early 2024, we. I actually didn't start it as a series, but I posted this recipe that was supposed to be like, they taste like Sour Patch Kids. And it was just like candied citrus peels. Like sour candied citrus peels. Um, and that actually, that post did so well that it actually got us to a million followers. And I was like, all right, better than store bought. We're making this a series and we're doing recipes that are, you know, either a direct copycat of a store bought snack or food or something that's similar and has a similar flavor profile, but is made with better ingredients and better. I don't necessarily even mean like nutritionally, but just, you know, things taste better when they're made with good quality ingredients. So we kicked that series off in February of 2024 and that went absolutely nuts for us. So we started doing. We had actually already done a recipe for like homemade Cheez Its and that had gone super viral. So we redid that and reposted it. We did. Crackers always do really well for us. So a bunch of like homemade crackers, pop tarts, you know, goldfish, all those sorts of pieces of content. And that's where our following just totally skyrocketed. We actually, I think, hit 2 million.

Fairly quick. I don't remember how long it was. It was probably another six months or so after.

And this was 2 million on Instagram.

On Instagram specifically. It also took off on TikTok for us because to that point, TikTok, you know, I still haven't cracked the code on TikTok, but that was, we had videos that were doing very well on TikTok. TikTok, but not necessarily, that wasn't necessarily corresponding to follower growth. But once we started that Better than Store bought series on TikTok, that was, that just went nuts for us. And that really encourages people to follow because obviously they want to come back for the next episode. And literally we would have text on screen that was like homemade goldfish. Episode 5 of Better Than Store Bought. So it was just like very clear.

That this is, this is a series, this is the focus. Yeah, yeah.

If you, you, if you follow us, you're getting another episode next week of Better Than Store Bought and encouraging people to, you know, comment what they wanted to see next. And.

Yeah, so we also did like a Christmas Advent calendar series in December of 2023 where every day we were like pulling a recipe out of our Advent calendar and making it on screen. And that's done really well for us last two years as well. So really most of our big follower growth periods were either from a post that went just crazy viral, like a standalone post, or from these series. So that, and I don't know that I necessarily recommend that nowadays, but that.

Was what was working then.

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

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

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

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

Which I do still think is true for sure. But at the same time it's like, okay, well we want to keep these, you know, make sure that these people are actually interested in our brand and are going to be long term readers. So we were constantly like, how do we, you know, we have to, we have to put stuff on the blog. We have to put stuff on the blog and we would always run out of time. So last year we, we really were like, all right, we gotta, we gotta change the strategy a little bit. Even if we sacrifice some views on.

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So I can't take total credit for this Facebook strategy because I did have a consulting session of my own with the Food Dolls are Killing it on Facebook especially.

Yep.

And they gave me some tips for Facebook and went nuts for us. So I do want to touch a little bit on our strategy there.

Yeah. Facebook would be great to talk about that.

I think Instagram is so fickle and you know, the, the algorithm is constantly changing. So I used to be pretty confident about my advice through with Instagram content.

Yeah. And it feels like it's now I'm like, I don't.

I'm not. Honestly not sure.

Yeah.

But Facebook is a little steadier. So I'm just gonna kind of run through our general strategy and I think that pretty much anyone can see at least a bit of a lift from implementing.

Cool. That's great.

Yeah. So the basic thing with Facebook is just consistency and trial and error and just posting a ton.

By a ton.

What does that look like?

Like you can post as much as you want. That can be. If you don't have a ton of time. You know, maybe that's four times a day. If you do have a ton of time, or if you have an someone that can help you, that's like ten plus times a day.

And is that all different types of content? Maybe we'll get into that.

But yeah, videos are king. Absolutely. And I don't think that'll necessarily ever change. But I was actually looking at a breakdown of my monetization earlier today and I was kind of surprised by how it all worked out. I mean, you even can monetize stories which are literally no effort because I just pressed the button that Says repost.

To stories when you post, publishing to Instagram. You republish to Facebook. Yeah. And then can monetize those.

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

Amazing. So like in a year and a half.

Year. Year and a half, yeah.

Yep.

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

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

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

Sure. Like, do you have to be at a certain level or.

Yeah, used to be like 5,000 followers and some watch time, month, but I couldn't find anything really specific on that. So I'm not 100% sure. But now it's basically just one block of monetization. But it does still break it down. Like I was looking at mine today and it's like reels, photos, stories, and then text based posts. And then there's also a bonus program. So again, I don't know if everyone has this available or if it's. It's just available to some creators, but it's basically just a bonus based on. I believe it's just based on your general engagement throughout the month.

Sure.

So I have one that's available right now. And it's if I hit a certain amount of money for the month, I get an additional like $500 bonus or something. Who knows how they calculate this? And it probably changes every month.

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

We are definitely here for it.

Yeah.

So, yeah, this year, really, we've just been experimenting more with getting people to our website because like I said, that's been a focus for us with having a baby. It hasn't gone as well as we.

Hoped, but time wise, you mean, like, just have done? Totally. Yeah.

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

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

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

Yes. And, and, and so if you are actively posting, what does that look like? So that Thousand dollars a week? Is that like two or $3,000 a week potentially just from Facebook?

Yeah. So it really fluctuates throughout the year. Summer seems to be the worst time, which I, I think makes sense. People aren't necessarily on their phones as much. Um, holidays are obviously amazing, but in our top months, I think we've made four to six thousand a week. Amazing on Facebook. Yeah. And then we are now getting a ton of traffic on our website from it. So in the last month, our revenue from our website, our Facebook, our social media traffic has actually exceeded our organic traffic, which we don't have. Like a crazy website. Sure, you guys. So that's maybe not saying much for some people.

No, but it's like, substantial in that not only are you earning from the platform itself, but you are also earning from the traffic that the platform sends. Which when you compare that against, like, an Instagram, it gets more complex from, like, what is my relationship to Instagram as a creator? It's like maybe branded partnerships, it's awareness. It's like, maybe we were just talking about this today. Like, how do we, as smart as possible, approach posting content to Instagram knowing that what we are selling is free content? And that's like, a lot easier on Facebook when they're gonna pay you to post and you can put a link in and then people click on it and go to your site. Like, the formula is very different. And so it's interesting to see like, the rise of Facebook again, where, you know, when we've been creating content as long as we have 15 years, it was like, man, Facebook was like the best thing ever. And then they flipped this switch. You lost all this organic traffic or like social traffic that you could get from Facebook. But now you really see kind of this second coming of Facebook where people, partly because of the incentive around creating revenue, but also because of the ability to send traffic. Like, there's a new renewed interest in Facebook. So can you talk about, you know, you talk about posting frequency and then you also talked about, hey, if you have some stuff that that you knew went viral, you can go and pull that up again and post it again. What are your other strategies that have been working with Facebook today? Knowing that you referenced Instagram and being like, eh, it's kind of hard to know on Instagram as of today, but Facebook, it seems like there's some things that you feel a little bit more confident in. Frequency. Posting a lot videos, like reels, doing well, reposting content that does well. What else would be important things for us to be aware of as creators.

So we basically recycle our content every three or four weeks on Facebook. And even, you know, Instagram, there are things that I've reposted this year that have got gotten 30 million views in the last, you know, in 2024. And then I repost them this year and they don't even hit a million. So that's disappointing to see for sure. But Facebook, there are more predictable that I have reposted like 12 times and they've gone viral four or five times, several million views every time that they're posted.

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

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

In that case, would you still see like the other comments or it'd be a new piece of content.

They're still distinct individual posts, but it's just repurposed. The content is already uploaded in there, which is just so nice. And sometimes it would show the cumulative views that had gotten through all of those reposts. Sometimes it didn't. You know, Facebook is, I'm not sure what they're doing over there.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, everything, everywhere, no matter what you're doing on the Internet.

Exactly. So we set up, we use grocer's List instead of ManyChat for our DM automation. So we have that set up for Facebook and we'll put the link in there so our audience is somewhat trained to know to comment recipe. But then we will have a comment that just says comment recipe and we'll send it to your inbox or get the full recipe here and then I'll just link to our blog post sometime.

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

Yeah, yeah. And some people, yeah, I, you know, I don't really understand.

Who knows why people would do that. But they do it.

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

Yeah, got it. And so when you're posting to Facebook, it's like a short little description or maybe the recipe name.

You are not including.

The a link to the recipe in the description, but then you are pinning a comment.

So unfortunately you can't pin comments anymore on Facebook, which I understand why, but.

You'Re just commenting after.

I just comment after. Actually, you can also schedule comments. So if you schedule a bunch of content out and then you go into your scheduled posts on Facebook, you can basically just click on the post and then leave a comment and it'll publish with that content or with that comment.

Got it.

So that's really helpful because obviously I'm not doing all of this live. Um, so that's kind of my strategy for reels. And then there are. And so, you know, like I said, we repost every three to four weeks. Like, there's. You really can't post a piece of content too frequently on Facebook. I usually try to wait. If something is going viral, you can obviously see analytics of, you know, when it's. When the views are happening. So I usually try to wait until something is tailing off to repost it again. Yep. But you really can't post too often on Facebook.

And what would if in your ideal world, let's say you had no other obligations, how much would you be posting?

I.

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

Yeah.

So it's totally worth it to just try anything.

Well, and it's interesting. Like, you. I think of it like, what does that look like when it converts over? And to use a super easy rough estimate, like, let's say that you have a site and you're using an ad partner, and you have.

You know, RPM that you can look at. And then from that, you can look at like, okay, what is the earnings rpm? Like, how much are you earning when somebody comes over from a source? And so, like, let's say it's $40 for Facebook and you get 500 people who come over. So was it worth the two minutes it took to schedule a link to make $20? Probably. And then what you do is you start to stack that and you say, like, okay, can I do that predictably, once a day. Okay, that's cool. Cause that's like $600. Can you do it twice a day? Okay, $1,200. Okay. What is, what is another area that I could publish content to and make a thousand dollars. And incrementally, what you can do is you can start to be really strategic about thinking about essentially like syndicating your content into different places. And it's one of the great things about Facebook is that you do that. And it sounds like you can then do that again in two months, as long as it's seasonally appropriate and get another 500 clicks or whatever it is for your site, you know, depending on how many people are following and whatnot. So you were maybe talking about this a little bit. You said you kind of wait a certain period of time before republishing something. That's essentially like six to eight weeks, it sounds like. Or it depends.

It depends on the piece of content. But often it's like three to four weeks. It's. I, I really don't space them out that far. Obviously, if it's seasonal, then we'll stop posting.

Right?

Like, we're probably not posting much summer content right now, and we're really ramping up. And that's another thing too, you know, like, you can post Christmas content on Facebook in September, August, and yeah, you get a few comments. But.

Right. Yeah.

Well, honestly, at this point, yeah, yeah, it's. It's really. You just have to find a way to make it as efficient as possible. Because when you're first starting out, it's going to take a little bit longer to figure out your so specific strategy and, you know, figuring out how to add the comment into. In the scheduler, it takes a little bit of time to figure out a flow. But especially if you have somebody, if you're fortunate enough to have somebody that you know is doing some virtual thing, that's a great path. Someone could spend literally 20 minutes a day scheduling out a bunch of posts. And even, you know, with the, for example, with the links to the website posts, they are not necessarily generating revenue, a ton of revenue on the Facebook monetization program. But that's where I'm just choosing to be like, okay, this. What's more important with those is, is building an audience on our website and getting these repeat visitors. And then obviously, yeah, the videos really, if you want to succeed and grow on Facebook, it's about the videos a hundred percent.

So can you talk more about that? So now there's one. It sounds like there's one general video. Not a Facebook expert. So this is me learning as well. There's one general video upload now. It's not like reels versus. There used to be like reels and then videos. Is it just reels now? Is it just video? What is. How does that work?

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

And is it all vertical then? Like, you can still upload horizontal or horizontal. Okay. But it's just called reels.

Yeah, I don't really.

Okay.

I mean, it is kind of nice that they simplified it because when I was trying to explain it to people, I'm like, well, sure, you can also do a video. And it's like, is that the same as a reels? Like, no, but also it kind of is because it looks the exact same. So yeah, that's, that's one change. But that's really where you're gonna see growth. If you have something that goes viral on Facebook, you're going to see follower growth for sure. And we are consistently seeing it surpass Instagram, like constantly.

Growth, like growth per day.

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

Amazing.

Most of the time it's over a thousand. And that's even during periods where we.

We are not posting. Yep.

Yeah. And they're. I'm like.

And. And you attribute the majority of that to video content.

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

Yeah.

If they. I just think Facebook is a little bit different in that sense.

Like, it's weird. Facebook is weird.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're like, oh, this looks like something I would eat. So I might as well follow because maybe I'll make something from this page and it's just different, you know.

Yeah, it's a little bit more. It's, it feels like the branding component is less curated. It's more of like, hey, this is content adjacent to what I want to see in my feed. I'm going to click follow. Like who knows if that's the actual mindset, but it's kind of what it feels like. And so you would attribute that to video content. One of the questions I have, how much video content do you have? Like you've grown this to over 2 million. On how many videos at this point.

We probably have.

200 maybe that are. Perform. That perform decently well. Like we have videos from back in the day that I don't post at all because I have tried to post them on Facebook and they still don't do well. Yeah, I think maybe around 200. And that's including like branded partnership videos, which by the way, another great thing to touch on there. I actually just posted one the other day. That was a sponsored video that we did in May, I think, and it went over a million, you know, which is better than it performed on Instagram. So. And we're continuing to post those time after time. So that's hugely beneficial for brand partnerships.

Anyway, though we point being it's, it's dual benefit benefit. We've had a couple of pieces of content like that. We get paid to create the content, get paid to post the content. The content does well.

Exactly.

It's awesome for the brand that you're working with. Awesome for you. It's like the best outcome from like content creation business perspective.

And it's incredible to, to be able to show them, you know, a year later, look how many views this video generated from me posting it eight times.

Yeah, like that is a great relationship component for branded partnership as well.

Exactly. Especially for our long term partners. I'm sorry, I lost track of.

No, that's great. So yeah, we were talking about kind of the components that have gone into the growth and the piece that I was most interested in is like you've grown to over 2 million, you know, followers. A thousand followers a day. Oftentimes more than that. And I think this is the interesting and important piece. Some people would think like, oh my goodness, you must be cranking out content every day. It's just good content and then strategic reposting of that content.

And it's not just video, but it sounds like video has been the most important, but it's video interspersed with some links interspersed with maybe an image interspersed with maybe just text. Like all of these have resulted in really significant growth, but it doesn't require you to be shooting every day ad nauseam, which I think is the important point within this.

Absolutely not. Yeah, it's really, really, really about quality over quantity. We, when we were first starting out with this new strategy, I think our goal was to film three pieces of content or post three pieces of content per week. And then that quickly went down to two. And this year, frankly, it's been one a lot of the times. And pretty much my entire maternity leave, it was zero. And we were just reposting content that did well last year. And we, I mean, we're at the point now where we really want to put some, a lot more effort back into Instagram because we've, we've really let it slide over the last couple of months. But you can keep this going 100% on, on old content. I mean, we, yeah, we literally did not create a new piece of content from I think April to July or something.

Yeah. So that's great.

I, we could talk.

Yeah.

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

Yeah. So it's called Crowded Kitchen and it is going to be published in late February. So we are getting excited.

We have.

Should be getting our first cop real copy soon.

Cool.

Yeah, it's available for pre order, pretty much.

Pre order, that's like the thing, right? Like you got to get a lot of pre orders get the pre orders up.

Got to get those pre orders.

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

Yeah, thank you so much.

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