Social media for organic products promotion

Abstract

The aim of the article is to introduce new social media as one of effective marketing tools for organic farmers. The research includes an application of recommendations proposed by Lohr (2013). In order to verify them on successfully implemented concept working with precisely defined target group the data from Facebook of the Faculty of Economics and Management of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague were chosen. As one of the key indicators of success the reach of the published posts is examined. For its increasing we recommend to publish short posts and amusing content (such as photos). We analyse separately the influence of games and competitions on the loyalty of fans and recommend using them for better communication with users. The results of mutually done analysis of utilization of Facebook to promote organic products showed that having a lot of fans at Facebook does not necessary mean that they are active as well. The distribution of activities corresponds to the so-called "long tail", which implies, using the theory of social capital exchange according to Emerson (2003) that the potential of social media for farmers' pages is nowadays still high and still waits for its utilization. Social media can serve to farmers as a marketing tool, but are not fully utilized yet. One reason might be that farmers are not familiar with possibilities or lack of experiences with this new tool.