Using Social Media to Do Promotions: the 5th Street Market Experiece

You can use social media to engage customers and bring them into your place of business. Here is what Fifth Street Public Market has learned.
Sterling: Have you noticed, since you’ve started the Twitter and Facebook, an increase-- a lot of people start these things so they can increase engagement. Have you no ticed a big difference in how engaged your consumers are, or your customers are, with either the social media or the market itself?
Somer: What’s the response? Are they responding? Has there been a lot of like-- because I was telling them when we started Facebook, it went from-- we were looking and see how many people signed up. It went up to over 300 people just in the first few days.
Lindsey: There’s definitely a circle in Eugene that they are the Tweeters. So it’s like, Café Yum, Market of Choice, Travel Lane County, who will just constantly re-Tweet your messages. So they, I would say-- they’re always the ones who boost your morale. You’re like, “Oh, I’ve been re-Tweeted.” But I wouldn’t say that we have an expanding base of re-Tweeters. I’d say probably every third message that we send out is re-Tweeted by at least one of our followers that we follow.
Lindsey: No, I actually said, “Hey, email me if you want some coupons for the market. I’ll send you some.” I probably got probably about 30 people that I actually sent PDF coupons to, and they all direct-messaged me and they were like, “Yeah, I’d like some.” So then they gave me their email addresses and I shot them some coupons.
Somer:. We have coupon sheets that we’ve done that are retail, that different stores around the market can offer different discounts with the map on the back that we’ve designed. You know, “Here’s the market.” And also café ones, so that we try and track those. We have some kind of little codes on them, so we get a feel for which of those works, and what are coming back to us. But those are what Lindsey was talking about when she posted that on there. Like, “Hey, we’ll send those out to you if you...”
Lindsey: Yeah, and we got a pretty good response from that, and people re-Tweeted that quite a bit. So people that aren’t even following us were like, “Hey, I heard that you guys have coupons.”
Somer: And Hartwick’s did a big campaign as well. They were doing that whole like, “Pay 50 dollars for a gift certification and get 75 dollars’ worth,” or something like that. They had a big campaign with that and was really, really successful in the sense that they got a huge response from it.
Our eBlast is another big thing that we just started using pretty heavily, and I think that’s been somewhat successful, because that’s another thing that people have specifically signed up for. We utilize both our newsletter database for that and also our eBlast database. So it’s kind of how I was saying people have chosen to sign up. Not that we don’t still get people saying, “Take us off,” but I think that happens with anything.

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