How Consumers Use Social Networks to Connect with Food Retailers: Online and Social Media Tools

We first asked participants to indicate which online or social media tools they found to be useful when they desired to connect with a business.  Regarding websites and emails, we discovered that nearly a third of respondents found a promotional website to be useful while only 23% found websites that sell products useful (as seen in Table 1).  About one in five found emails and e-newsletters useful.

Table 1.  Percent of participants who found the following components to be useful in connecting with a fresh fruit or vegetable company.

Component	Percent response
Website for promoting food products	31.0%
Website for selling food products	23.4%
Email newsletter	22.0%
Email sent by the business	19.1%

 

When we looked at social media tools, we found that relatively few found the tools to be useful with regard to fresh fruit and vegetable businesses.  However, we did not, in this question, differentiate between different types of retail outlets so we are not able to indicate differences between farm markets and large-scale grocery stores, for example.

As seen in Table 2, though, there were certainly differences across age groups, with nearly a quarter of those between 18 and 36 finding Facebook to be useful.  The same general pattern held for blogs and Twitter, but the percentages were much lower.  The trend; however, was reversed for emails and e-newsletters.  In that case, those in older age groups were more likely to find those tools to be useful.

Table 2.  Percent of participants, segmented by age group, who found select social networks (Facebook, Twitter, blogs) and emails (newsletters and other emails sent by a food retailer) to be useful in connecting with a fresh fruit or vegetable company.

Age group	Facebook	Twitter	Blogs	Email sent by business, other than newsletter	Email newsletter
18 to 24	23.9%	8.0%	9.1%	6.8%	14.8%
25 to 36	25.1%	10.3%	16.3%	17.1%	21.3%
37 to 48	17.0%	5.6%	6.5%	18.3%	19.0%
49 to 64	13.1%	2.8%	5.5%	22.5%	23.4%
65 and older	13.7%	2.6%	0.9%	22.2%	31.6%

 

As you look at Table 3, you will see that there was also a significant difference between those with less than seventy six thousand dollars of income and those with higher incomes in terms of how useful these groups found Facebook Pages to be.  Those with higher incomes were about twice as likely to find these useful.

Table 3.  Percent of participants, segmented by income level, who found Facebook Pages to be useful in connecting with a fruit or vegetable business.

Income level	Percent response
$24,000 or less	14.4%
$24,000 to $49,9999	9.2%
$50,000 to $74,999	10.6%
$75,000 to $99,999	18.6%
$100,000 to $149,999	19.0%
$150,000 or greater	22.0%

 

Finally, Table 4 shows that 25% of those with a Master’s degree or higher found emails to be useful in connecting with fruits or vegetables businesses. Those with less education found emails to be less useful.

Table 4.  Percent of participants, segmented by education level, who found emails to be useful in connecting with a fruit or vegetable business.

Education level	Percent response
High school degree or less	15.4%
Some college	19.7%
College degree	17.2%
Master's degree or greater	25.5%

 

With this data, fruit and vegetable retailers can draw many different conclusions.  One conclusion is that no more than a third of any group found online and social media tools to be useful in connecting with a business around fresh fruits and vegetables.  This result may indicate that fresh fruits and vegetables are “staple” items that many consumers expect from a food retailer.  However, we did not analyze responses by type of retail outlet, so we cannot say this is true for direct markets as well as larger food retailers. Another conclusion is that participants found websites and emails to be more useful than social networks.  However, among social media tools, Facebook was indicated to be the most useful. 

In the next article, we will present data related specifically to how our respondents perceived Facebook as being a useful tool for various types of food retailers.  To view the entire YouTube series, please visit http://bit.ly/wWIXto.