Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Twitter
We like Twitter, but why would we would recommend you use Twitter? It
is text based while your business is colourful and inspiring - anything but
textual. However, a lot of your customers are using Twitter or are reading
tweets without having an account so you should not ignore this network.
A culinary business should have a Twitter account as part of the market
toolkit.
Twitter is as easy as Facebook, do not make the mistake to link them
together. Tweets are different than Facebook posts and being lazy never
resulted in a lot of new customers, and it will not work with Twitter
either.
Tweets are short messages of
140
characters or less, so here are some
quick tips in a random order:
•
Set up an account with the business name but add the name of the per-
son posting in the description;
•
Interact: the 'social' part of 'social media' means participants have to talk
and listen. Most companies know how to talk but they do not listen - and
therefore they do not interact!
•
Be helpful. People ask a lot of question about cooking and produce on
Twitter. Answer those questions. You are the knowledge hub, which the
supermarket is not;
•
Ask your followers questions, they are your customers;
•
You do not have to follow back everyone. As a golden rule you should
have more followers than accounts you are following yourself;
•
Post photos, you can do it from your smartphone within a few seconds;
•
Place an inspiring picture on your Twitter page. Remove the common
blue background, inspire visitors from the first second;
•
Do not tweet offers only, no one is interested in a digital advertisement of
your business. You can do it once in a while but social media is like a
family reunion: people talk about everything and nothing and no one is
interested in your promotions all the time;
•
Let customers know what is going on in your business: new produce
being harvested, new farm activities available, a great added value your
team created: it is all interesting!
These are just nine tips you can use to get started with Twitter. Many
of the food tourism ventures are not using Twitter or other social media
in case people complain about their business. Those people will probably
complain about you anyway and the benefit of being on social media is that
you know exactly who is complaining and you can respond immediately to
resolve the complaint.
For most consumers a complaint is not a problem, the real problem oc-
curs when you fail to solve it in a satisfying way. We also found that con-
sumers who complained continuously about the service of a client who was
not willing to look at a solution were corrected by other customers of the
business. It does not get more social than that.
