Allrecipes creates efficiency and drives performance with the SocialFlow Publisher Platform.
Allrecipes.com, the world’s largest digital food brand, is a food-focused social network helping home cooks further their food passions and achieve everyday food goals. The site is among the ten largest social sites receiving more than 1.3 billion visits annually. The digital content has a coordinating print magazine showcase the best content from the site.
OBJECTIVE:
At the onset of 2015, the Allrecipes leadership team set out some aggressive goals to rapidly accelerate site traffic growth. A key strategy for driving this growth was to introduce Allrecipes to the next generation of home cooks – mainly millennials who are just starting to define and pursue their food passions. With this audience segment dedicating so much time to social media, expanding Allrecipes brand presence on leading social channels was identified as the key factor to supporting Allrecipes growth. Given this challenge the Allrecipes Social Team, after research and analysis decided to first focus their efforts on growing Allrecipes Facebook presence—by increasing the quantity of posts and quantity of fans.
CHALLENGE:
With a lean social team, and a directive to quickly develop new tactics for connecting Allrecipes brand with younger audiences, the team determined production and workflow efficiencies were necessary to ensure they didn’t sacrifice the quality of posts while ramping up quantity. The team also needed to be sure that the time and effort they invested in Facebook didn’t result in neglecting other key social channels that are important to their brand.
The Allrecipes social team was eager to have measurable and quantifiable results for the new work that they were doing that could help them attribute social referrals for increased growth in site visits.
They had a finite budget to help bolster posts.
To reach our goals, it was important that we be able to focus our time on content marketing strategy rather than coordinating the time and delivery of posts. With SocialFlow, instead of making educated guesses, we were able to utilize the platform to have the intelligence needed to inform and guide our posting strategy while we focused on content growth. That was a big draw for us with SocialFlow.
– Lorraine Goldberg, Social Media Manager
THE SOLUTION:
Allrecipes brought in SocialFlow to improve their efficiency. As a small team, they needed simple workflow solutions to save time throughout their day so they could spend more time thinking strategically. Immediately with SocialFlow the team experienced time savings. Team members embraced the optimization feature to auto-post their content. They could “set it and forget it,” and move to the next items on their lists. They found the tool’s interface made it easy to swap and edit images, headlines, post copy, and link text creating efficiencies when testing posts.
Because we’re achieving our goals more efficiently with SocialFlow, we’ve been able to reduce time and money spent on content promotion and boosting posts. Now as a team we’re much more pointed and strategic with our spending to better meet business goals. We’re reinvesting budget savings on other areas such as fan growth which for us is really ‘the icing on the cake.’
SUCCESS:
After initiating optimization, the team saw increased engagement success with their posts. In the past, they had looked to paid social advertising to amplify post-performance when needed. With SocialFlow, they were able to achieve better results organically, minimizing the need to invest in paid promotion. This freed up the budget that could be spent elsewhere.
All performance indicators are significantly up since onboarding the SocialFlow Publisher Platform.
“Allrecipes had its most successful month ever in December with 50 million cooks visiting the site and consuming one-third of a billion pages of food content across connected devices. A key contributor to this growth was our team’s success reaching younger audiences through social posts. Higher quality, more frequent posts allowed us to grow our audience of millennials 22% YOY, and more importantly lead the highly competitive food category in social referrals” –Esmee Williams, Vice President, Consumer and Brand Strategy
