Polly Barnfield shows how Weston's Farm Shop used a Halloween pumpkin-carving competition on social media to drive engagement. Staff posted their designs in a numbered graphic and asked followers to vote, minimal effort that generated high interaction. The strategy works for any business: seasonal, team-focused content taps into people's love of voting and builds community.
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Today we're looking at how you can use social media to get your customers to support your team as an independent business. This is Weston's Farm Shop. They sell locally produced food and drinks and is a family run independent business which is really celebrated in the local area. As you can see, they're really strong on social media. They're always present and to be honest, they do all the things. Now, one of the things that I do really enjoy though is actually this post. I absolutely love it now. I love it for a lot of reasons because obviously it's seasonal and so it was done around about Halloween, which, you know, kind of goes without saying. So I think, you know, getting behind the season is always something that's good. But obviously being a farm shop pumpkins seems like quite, you know, a natural go to again. So it kind of, you know, lends itself to, I guess, what they would focus on. But what they did was they got all their team to do a pumpkin carving competition. And then they took each image, they put it together in one graphic here, put it together in one graphic. As you can see, they gave them all a number. So they made it super simple for people to choose and then basically what they asked was for people to choose their favorite. Um, and yeah, that person would be the winner. They didn't see the winner of what. They didn't see what it would be. But it's just such a good idea actually. I must say that the team did a really good job and it's quite impressive actually. However, what I love is that, you know, it's, it's numbered so it makes it easy to choose. It's ghostly. Greetings. This Halloween, this farm shop team has been busy carving pumpkins. They all look spooktacular. And please help us pick a winner by voting for their favorite creation. So they're not giving customers, you know, anything to win. This is about the team. This is about the team efforts. This is all the team have done. This you can actually see in the background there, look, you know, there's hands and things. So the people are actually holding it. You can see someone's top there, see another set of hands. So again, you can see real people actually did this in the farm shop. It's a team effort and their clinic of clearly, you know, like doing a little bit of friendly competition in the farm shop, which again is, it shows a kind of like, you know, family. It shows that everyone's all working together. It shows that team spirit and people love it. So it's a really good way without Actually showing your team, it's really good way of having customers connect with your team and show that you are, you know, an independent local business no matter how big you are. Also, people love giving opinions. People absolutely love a competition. People love giving opinions as well. So by asking them which one their favorite is, you're asking people to give an opinion and people will always, always do it. So look, I mean, that is a lot of engagement for a really, really simple thing. So it got the team all together, it got customers all together and it really bridged that gap between, you know, the physical and the digital. So absolutely, well done. And I think that any business could do something like this. So whether it was that you got your team to do a window competition and you displayed it on social media, it might be a display in your store or did I say even, you know, a hair or nail, you know, design competition or even, you know, if you're a bar cockt and that gets to be on your next menu, any business can follow suit. It's all about, I guess, you know, driving that connection between your customer and your team. Now if I was these guys, what I would want to do is I would want to make sure that I was really engaged with all of my local suppliers. You know, they use local locally produced items. So say they put together, I don't know where they source their. It might be meats or it might be vegetables, if it's not directly from their farm. It might be butter, it might be cheese, whatever it might be. Should. What they do is they add all their businesses in here into the group section. So you go into engagement, engage and you add all the business in here and you turn that into a group and then within that group. So say you would choose, I don't know, I would put it together that it's all local bakeries, for example, that deliver your bread. So you pop it in here and then all of the, all of the businesses that you've popped into the group all come up here and you should see all of their posts and so you don't have to go searching for them. You can quite literally go in and like, you can comment, you can actually turn it into your own post if you want to share it. But it just, it means that you're constantly coming up in their conversation, they're always coming up in yours. So you're sharing customers and you're supporting a local business and you're supporting one of your suppliers. So it's only going to drive that, that relationship between you. Now if you've got any questions whatsoever, click on the little blue button. We love to help.
