Q: Why did you decide to start using Twitter?

A: Twitter was something that, because I had no familiarity with it compared to other social media sites, I initially resisted because it was something new. I kept talking to a friend of mine who actually works in social media for a company here in Harrisburg, and he was explaining how it worked. I kept thinking about it and kicking the idea around, and when I finally did decide to sign up for it, it became clear to me that it was actually, in my opinion, going to be more valuable as a business tool than any of the other social media outlets that we were a part of.

Q: Why has Twitter been so valuable?

A: It can turn itself into free advertising in no time. To give a specific example, we were doing a bulk discount at some of our farmers markets in Philadelphia, and so I just fired off a tweet about it. It started getting retweeted by a lot of food bloggers in that town who follow us, and we were able not only to bring more people to our market that we maybe hadn’t seen before or were irregular shoppers of ours who maybe would show up once in a while. Once they knew we had this deal going with bulk apples sales, all of a sudden they would start showing up. A lot of folks I know who might have gotten just a handful of apples — like maybe a $6 or $7 sale — were taking advantage of the bulk discount and spending more to get more per unit. It turned a lot of $6 or $7 sales into $20 sales.

So it seems like a pretty easy source of free advertising, once you have people who are good customers of yours and are paying attention to what you’re putting up there. It’s a really simple tool to use. It doesn’t take any time, and I really had no reason to avoid it. It’s really not something that’s that difficult to use.

Q: How did you build up followers?

A: I was able to find a few people — like some of the folks who sponsor our farmers market and a few other farms I knew were on Twitter — and once we started following them, they would often return the favor and follow what we were doing ... so we started building up a follower base that way.

Q: What kind of feedback have you gotten?

A: I actually haven’t had folks give me feedback at market about it necessarily, but I’ve seen a lot of folks on Twitter who would say, “Hey, I got your apples this weekend. They were really good.” Another thing that’s been helping is a lot of the folks we do wholesale deliveries to all have accounts, and they’re really good about updating their Twitter whenever we make a delivery. So I see it more online than I do customers in person, but then again we’ve only had it since about the beginning of September or end of August. We haven’t had a whole lot of time to build up a lot of followers. I’ve actually been pretty impressed. But right now most of our followers are food bloggers and other farms, and I think we have a few regular customers on there, but I think that part is still building up.

Q: How often are you tweeting?

A: It depends on what’s going on. I actually was just sitting down to update our blog with what we’re going to have for our last week of farmers markets. Usually that’s something that I’ll just throw up on Twitter when I’m done sending the e-mail out ... I’ll probably put another tweet up before the end of the week to remind everyone of the same bulk discounts and hopefully get some retweets and some more folks visiting us this weekend.

As things come up, I’ll just tweet about it. I found a link one time of somebody who was growing Bartlett pears that were shaped like Buddha, and oddly enough, that’s the kind of thing that people, for whatever reason, are really interested in on Twitter. So it’s not necessarily related specifically to your business, but it’s kind of building good will with your customers, and it makes you worth following if you can find fun stuff like that to put up once in a while. Whenever I run into something like that, I’ll throw that on there, too.

Q: How are you using Facebook?

A: Facebook at this point is kind of linked in with our Twitter, really. Oddly enough, one of the things we use Facebook for is keeping our market employees informed of different things, like “sign up to work this market,” or “we have a training event coming up - everyone RSVP with a Facebook invite,” - that kind of thing.

Right now we’re actually getting more feedback from actual customers on Facebook than maybe we do on Twitter, but it’s just one of those things where I think each of these things is still slow in building up. But I think we’ll end up seeing some more folks on Facebook probably going into next year, and probably more followers on Twitter, I would guess going into next year, too.

Another thing I’ve done with Facebook is with permission, of course, thrown a bunch of testimonials we get on our Facebook page, onto our website under a link I created for testimonials. So that kind of thing has been really good. We’ve taken photos from fans of ours from Facebook who have posted pictures on our site, and we’ve actually been given permission and posted those on our website, too. So it’s accumulating pictures I can use for different promotions for really no cost at all. So that’s been helpful, as well.

Q: Is there anything you’d like to add?

A: I think the take-home message for me if I were to have a conversation with a growers about it – especially for Twitter - it doesn’t take as long as you might think. It’s a pretty good source of free advertising once you get some folks interested in what you’re putting on Twitter. Like I said, folks will catch something you’re doing, and it will just start making its rounds across the Internet without you really having to do anything at all.

Because it’s such a short message, you can fit exactly what you want – it’s just an important little byte of information, and if it catches on with the right audience, it can just become a small wave of free advertising for growers.

Commonly Used Twitter Terms

Tweet: noun: a post on Twitter; verb: to post something on Twitter