Food for thought

Being a foodie and passionate about cooking, I was happily surprised when I chanced upon Foodista.com a few months back. Foodista is this wonderful ‘Wikipedia’ style food website with loads of interesting culinary information ranging from recipes, food news, cooking techniques, healthy eating and much more. Launched by a bunch of techie people in 2008, the great thing about this site is that anybody can edit and contribute to the site and network by creating user profiles. Foodista is also credited with organizing the first-ever food bloggers’ conference (International Food Blogger Conference) in 2009 and since then it has become an annual event. And what is more exciting is that Foodista offers a free, live webcast of the event!

Foodista is surely doing the right things when it comes to using social media. Being a relatively new entrant, it already boasts of over 200,000 followers on Twitter and some 30,000 likes for their Facebook page. The secret of their Twitter success is I guess they did a good job building a relationship with the audience through frequent tweeting and responding to people and giving them interesting information. They do interesting stuff like showcasing ‘Food blog of the day’ and ‘Drink blog of the day’ on Twitter and Facebook. Another excellent example of Foodista’s engagement in social media is the ‘Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook’, a cookbook featuring winner recipes from a contest where Foodsita.com bloggers submitted their favorite recipes to be incorporated in the cookbook. I can’t wait to get my hands on the book, believe me!

Although Foodista is at a great place now in terms of social media presence, there is always scope for doing even better. For instance, it still has a long way to go as far as other mediums like YouTube, Pinterest etc. is concerned. With hardly any presence on YouTube, I think Foodista is missing out on a great opportunity. A first step could be creating its own YouTube channel. But for now, great job Foodista!