Five ways social media can drive Five a Day

The potential power of social media to change consumer behaviour has been highlighted by a new report. As food PR specialists, we look at effective ways to get the Five a Day message across.

Five a day social mediaA new report from Euromonitor says social media could be a good way to get us to eat our Five a Day.

The study lists the top 10 European markets with the highest fruit and vegetable consumption in 2015.

The UK was the seventh biggest buyer of fruit and fifth for vegetables.

Brits bought over 2.6 million tonnes of fruit and 3.75m tonnes of vegetables last year.

Anastasia Alieva, Euromonitor’s head of fresh food said. “The overall performance of fruits and vegetables in the UK is underpinned by the increasing health awareness among consumers and the growing adoption of vegetarian and vegan diets.”

She added that brands should start using the power of Twitter and Instagram to push healthy eating messages, rather than traditional print and TV advertising.

“With growing awareness of health issues and an increasing number of people adopting healthier diets, producers should focus on targeting an increasingly health¬ conscious and tech¬ savvy consumer base and aim to reach potential buyers through social media strategies and promoting the added¬ value benefits of fresh produce over processed alternatives.”

Despite Britain’s relatively high European ranking, consumption per person is low. The UK ranks 18th for fruit sales at 40.80 kg, and 17th for vegetables at 58 kg per person.

So as food PR specialists we thought we’d share our thoughts on how fresh produce brands can utilise social media to embed the healthy eating message.

1. Stop motion videos: With people looking for recipe ideas, create short and punchy videos for Twitter and Facebook

2. Use Pinterest: It’s not only a great way to showcase delicious food it can drive traffic to your website. Pinterest is second only to Facebook in the amount of traffic it drives to websites. Facebook’s American audience numbers 172 million, four times more than Pinterest’s. In Q4 2014, Pinterest with its “small” audience of 47 million sent 5% of all traffic to the 300,000 websites Shareaholic studied.

3. Promoted tweets: Research from Twitter and consumer data collection company Datalogix indicates the impact of promoted (paid for) and organic (not ¬paid for) tweets on offline sales, and claims users who engaged with promoted tweets purchased 12% more from that brand compared with 8% for organic tweets. But be careful not to breach the guidelines on promoted tweets, read our blog about the ASA and Alpro

4. Piggyback popular #: Amplify your social media accounts by linking to popular food and cookery trends such as #GBBO (Great British Bake Off). At the start of episode one of the current season GBBO was mentioned over 3,000 times per minute with the like of celebrities, businesses and regular folk tweeting a total of 139k over the hour-long episode, our GBBO blog discusses the phenomena

5. Tell the story behind the product: Social media is a great way of telling consumers the story of your produce. Initiatives like Great Fruit Adventure can link producers and consumers in innovative and exciting ways.

Find out how Pelican can help you create an effective social media campaign for your fresh produce or food brand.

Pelican Communications are specialists in the environmentfood and drinkoutdoor and leisure and packaging sectors and offer a range of services such as media relations, brand management, event management and people developmentContact us for marketing and communications expertise.

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