What Makes Whole Foods Social Media Strategy a Difference Maker?

When choosing to learn from others, it is always helpful to choose first-movers like Whole Foods social media. They have been successfully executing a social media campaign for over 5 years, and their strategy has played a significant role in their growth.

If you’re not familiar with Whole Foods, it’s a leading natural and organic food store with nearly 300 locations in North America and the United Kingdom.

Their social media strategy is built around their company web site and 6 additional social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, their blog, and recent additions of Foursquare and Pinterest.

Their Twitter accounts are used primarily as a customer service tool … responding to individual customer questions and requests. They have several niches Twitter accounts for such special topics as wine and cheese, as well as accounts for most of the local stores.

Their Facebook and blog platforms allow them to promote more of their product information, health, recipes, and cooking tip content … engaging as well as educating their customers.

They also use both platforms to build their brand image. An example of this is an upcoming special film series “Do Something Reel Film Festival”. This extensive 6-month series, to start April 22, is a celebration of people who understand that small ideas can create big change.

The festival’s objectives are to connect the brand with food and environmental issues and to inspire people to make a difference.

There are six key reasons Whole Foods social media strategy is a successful difference-maker for their marketing campaign:

Whole Foods, while a large, international company, puts a priority on the local component of its strategy. There is a community manager assigned at every store, who manages their customer engagement through multiple platform accounts. They focus on being where the customers are.

They maintain very loose control from corporate headquarters. They assist and collaborate, but the local stores maintain lots of freedom of initiative.

All of the efforts are continually focused on improving the relevancy of customer engagement. They are not afraid to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.

Each social media platform has its primary objectives – with some flexibility and adaptability maintained.

The strategy sets a goal of linking and loose integration of all the platform efforts.

They believe in letting customer engagement and conversation occur as naturally as possible. They listen, observe, and apply new ideas from what they learn.

There are many ideas that you can take away from Whole Foods Social Media Strategy.

Which ones can you apply to your business?