Use Twitter to Market your Local Food

Do you sell your produce at multiple farmers markets? Have customers that wait all year for the first strawberries of the season? An innovative way to let customers know where you are, and what you are selling is via Twitter, a free social networking service that allows you to send text based posts of up to 140 characters. The messages are called "tweets" and those who subscribe to receive your posts are called "followers". You can restrict your tweets to a group of followers, or you can allow open access. The key to a successful marketing message using Twitter is to be friendly, clear and to the point - you only have 140 characters to get your message across!

Example messages would be:

Teresa's Great Garlic is ready!! Expect some in this week's CSA share. Call us if you want to purchase extra garlic 734-123-4567.

We'll be at the Winthrop Farmers Market today from 8:00 a.m. until noon! We have beautiful fresh cut flowers today only!

Today's the last day to register for the Local Food Festival! You can register on-line at (enter web site name).

Once you start using Twitter, you should use it consistently to keep your followers informed, but be careful not to overuse the service - one complaint that users have is that some tweet too frequently about trivial things and undermine the impact of their messages. How will you know if your Tweets are successful? The service lets you monitor how many followers you have - your followers should grow and sales should increase!