Food and Social Media - A Delicious Combination - CBD inTouch

Food and Social Media – A Delicious Combination

What do Starbucks, Coke, Whole Foods and Oreo Cookies have in common? In addition to being iconic American brands, they are each leading the industry in embracing social media in their own highly relevant and completely brand-right ways.

Let’s look at a couple of these beginning with Starbucks, a true social media giant. I found an article dated 2010 highlighting Starbucks’ 30,270 followers on Twitter. Two years later, that following has grown to 2,502,063. Plus an astonishing 30,000,000+ fans/likes on Facebook. Watch their posts on Twitter and be amazed by the volume of one-to-one problem-solving communications in 140 characters – all helping build brand loyalty by being super attentive. Listening, interacting, asking for ideas. Respecting their customers while keeping the hard sell to a bare minimum. The result? A record quarterly profit in Q4 of 2011.

Whole Foods views social media as a chance to educate while working on a hyper local level to bring customers into the store. So in addition to the corporate site (with nearly 3 million Twitter followers), individual locations (often groups of 4 or 5 Whole Foods within a city) have their own social media sites (typically Twitter) to handle local comments and talk about what’s on sale or new at the store. In fact, Whole Foods community managers estimate that only about 10% of their posts are content based, 5% are promotional and a full 85% are responses to customer comments.

Oreo – with 26,000,000 fans on Facebook – is a brand that turned 100 a couple months ago and is having a lot of pure fun and games via social media channels. To commemorate this milestone, they’ve introduced a birthday cake flavor (limited time) and developed a highly integrated birthday celebration campaign with a dedicated website and heavy social media engagement. A component is the “Oreo moments” movement, where people upload video or share tweets about their favorite interactions with Oreos. They’re looking for a “million moments” and are closing in with nearly 800,000 at last count.

Does a good social media program drive sales? Here’s what Coca Cola’s (35 million Facebook fans and 40,000 Twitter followers) senior vice president of integrated marketing has to say. In short, “Fans are twice as likely to consume and 10 times more likely to purchase than non-fans.”

Thus supporting recent studies which have shown that engagement via social media can resurrect food and beverage brands, helping them win the battle vs. private label. Especially amongst younger shoppers, the direct relationship via social media provokes an emotional brand connection that translates into loyalty and purchase.

How is your social media presence evolving?