Social Media at the Farmers Market

Social Media Marketing
Loudoun Valley HomeGrown Market Cooperative Annual Meeting | November 6, 2014
Friday, November 7, 14
Hi everyone! Mary asked me to speak to you all tonight about social media

1. What it can do
2. How you can use it
3. Cool tools
Specifically, I’m going to talk about three main things tonight: 1. what the tech can do for you, 2. how to utilize it to your benefit
and 3. some cool tools to impress your friends and make your life easier.
Who here would consider themselves comfortable with social media? Who has some sort of personal social media account?
How about your businesses? How much time do you spend with your business’ social media?
Social media is what we used to call social networking - which, despite the most recent digital nature of it, it simply connections
between humans. Humans have been connecting with each other since we’ve existed - it’s just taken different forms.
In person used to be the only option. Then letters, then the telephone, Now email, video chat, facebook, twitter.
And it’s that connection to your community that is so important to a business. And social media helps you do that, amplified.
Who here likes talking to friends or family about your day? Who’s enjoys speaking with customers about your business and
your products? At the core, that’s really all we’re talking about here.

1. Communicate with your community
2. Deepen customer relationships
3. Share your stories
4. Customer Service
Social media is a great way to:
1.Communicate with your customers
2.Let your customers get to know you and deepen your relationships with them
3.Share your stories and build your brand
4.Offer great customer service and respond to issues
Unlike just calling up a friend to talk to them about your day, though, you really do need to have a plan. Just like deciding what
crops to plant, or how many jars of salsa to bring to a particular market or when to offer a new product, you should have an eye
on ROI. Social media doesn’t have to cost money but it does cost time and you want to make it worth your while.

Take a look at the landscape and figure out where your sweet spot is. Figure out what platforms your customers are using.
You can either look at statistics like the Pew Research Internet Project which is linked in the document listed on your handout
or you can just ask your customers which one’s they like using.
To give you an idea, though - Facebook is still king and at the very least, your business should be on Facebook. As of
September 2013, 71% of online adults were on Facebook. Versus 17% who were on Instagram. But this is the general public -
pay attention where you get the most interaction - pay attention to how many “likes,” “retweets” or comments you get. You
need to try things out and see how they work for your particular situation. What works for me may not be the best for you.
That’s why everyone on the planet isn’t friends with everyone else.
Once you’ve chosen those social media sites, I recommend trying to stick to the same user name across all of them to make it
easier for your customers to find and engage with you. There are some sites that check usernames across platforms for you.
I’ve linked to them in the document noted on your handout.
So once you’re in these spaces - what do you do?
What are the kinds of things you talk about with your customers when they visit you at market?

share yourself!
Your social media should be a thoughtful reflection of you and your business. Allow people to connect with the genuinely
awesome people you are. Post only the things that feel right and celebrate your strengths. You don’t need to post just to post -
make sure that everything you post is true to your brand.

post about trends
Is it ‘National Acorn Squash Day’? You should be posting things about Acorn and other squash! (And noting that it’s National
Acorn Squash Day - which is September 7th in case you were wondering.) You can find more food holidays linked from the
document on your handout.
My favorite example of this is actually an example from a friend of mine who is in advertising and was on the Oreo account
during Superbowl 47 last year. During the 34 minute blackout during the game, Oreo, responded with this:

It was timely, and totally relevant. As Oreo is a snack food and during that particular game day, it’s reported that people go
through upwards of 15 million pounds of chips and other snack foods.

Other favorites include when Burger King and Jeep had an online conversation after Jeep’s twitter account was hacked

and this one - which includes Grumpy Cat - a strange internet sensation - and Disney.

#hashtag
As long as we’re talking about trends, let’s talk about hashtags. Hashtags, denoted by the pound sign. They’re ways that
people connect with content. Think of them as subject headings, or category tags. If i put the hashtag of #cookies on a post of
mine, anyone searching that word or tag will find my post.
It’s a way of
a) participating in a conversation and
b) letting people who aren’t currently “following” you to find you. great things to use hashtags on as locations such as
#leesburg and items such as #squash or #market.

It’s Saturday! Don’t forget to
head to #leesburg today and
stock up on #squash!
#hashtagdoneright
Use them in context of a sentence but please

It’s #Saturday! Don’t #forget
to #head to #leesburg
#today and #stock up on
#squash!
#hashtagfail
don’t go overboard.

It’s Saturday! Head over to
the @LoudounFarmMkts in
#leesburg today and stock up
on #squash!
Along the same lines, make sure you’re bringing people into the conversation who are relevant to the discussion! You usually
can link people to a post by using the @ symbol.

engage your community
ENGAGE YOUR COMMUNITY: Literally ask them questions or ask them to participate. Ask them what their favorite thing to do
wish squash is, or what their family does on snow days! People like to talk about themselves - give them the opportunity to.

all work and
no play...
DON’T BE ALL BUSINESS: Include some fun things in your posting! Is the dog covered in mud? Did one of your strawberries
grow in a heart shape? It takes no time at all to snap a photo of it and share with everyone.

listen!
LISTEN & ENGAGE
If you do nothing else with social media, you should at least use it to see what people are saying about you even when they
aren’t explicitly bringing you into the conversation.
In this example, Grand Rapids Library in MIchigan had used the twitter search capability to send them alerts when people in a
certain location tweeted certain keywords. Which is how they were able to find this tweet and send the person useful
information!

BONUS&TIPs:ea&srceh.tawrittcerh.co.mtwi5er.com&
Which brings us to those cool tools I promised you.
Here is search.twitter.com and one of my favorite things about it is you can search locations and keywords

This is the advanced search screen

You can also set up alerts for google (alerts.google.com) to email you when items come through.

(www.ifttt.com)
IFTTT.com is the greatest site on the web. It is a tool that allows you to automate connections between sites that otherwise
don’t talk to each other.
For example, every time getnoshy posts a photo and caption on instagram (because photos are a great way to engage
people), it automatically posts to the Noshy facebook page and getnoshy twitter account.
We all know that time is limited - so set it up so that you can post to multiple sites all at once! Using IFTTT you can link google
calendar with social media services to essentially “schedule” posts ahead of time! And if you’re just using Facebook, they
recently changed things and made it possible to set a posting date and time in the future.

There are a lot of apps that do things similar to this but A Beautiful Mess is an app for iphone and android that I use to create
things to post to instagram that aren’t photos - like this...

Noshy
www.getnoshy.com
@getnoshy
I know there’s a lot to talk about with regards to social media but I hope you found this very
brief primer helpful. I’m happy to take questions to talk with you later about more. Thanks!

Social Media at the Farmers Market

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