Customer experience with farmers’ markets: what hashtags can reveal

Abstract

Social media networks are increasing in popularity and have been integrated into many aspects of daily life. Analysis of the ways in which individuals use social media is important for understanding social, cultural, and environmental issues. This study examines experiences of farmers’ market customers through their self-expression on social networks. Contributions to the Instagram social network based on the #farmersmarket hashtag were gathered on a single day, yielding 19,398 contributions created by 13,862 users. Six major linked hashtags were identified (#Organic, #Fresh, #Food, #Local, #Vegan, and #Healthy), providing key indicators of the characteristics of farmers’ markets that are valued by customers. Four customer segments were identified: Product Oriented, Emotional Oriented, Social Oriented, and Product-Social Oriented, with strong interconnections identified between these communities. The results of this study provide insights into consumer values and behaviors in the farmers’ market context and will be of practical use for future marketing and management.

Twitter Analysis of Global Communication in the Field of Sustainability

“…They may be active on standard social networks such as Twitter and Instagram or on discussion forums [38], or they may insert their comments into articles in on-line news sites [39]. Such activities in social media take the form of expressing one's opinions, describing experiences, informing others of research results, or broadcasting realized or planned activities [40][41][42]. This constitutes the main reason to pay attention to an analysis of the communicated content.…”

“…The aim of image analysis is primarily to provide further information on the context of the report, such as the location (for example a farmers' market or a railway station) or fashion trends [45]. The text analysis is then focused on identifying keywords, using social networking techniques based on frequency distributions [46], or eigenvector and betweenness centrality [41,42]. Another area of the text analysis is sentiment analysis, which focuses on identifying the users' feelings [47].…”

“…That is the reason why the current research focuses on the prospective use of artificial intelligence in this field [48]. An alternative way to achieve the knowledge-from-text part of social networking data is analyzing the content of a communication by means of a hashtag analysis [41,42], a method that focuses exclusively on the hashtag type of metadata tag used on social networks to establish communities and to represent users voices [49], which was the focus of the present study. Namely, we adopted a communication analysis of the Twitter network to identify the main topics of communication related to the hashtag #sustainability.…”

Farmers’ Market Actors, Dynamics, and Attributes: A Bibliometric Study

“…The possibility to interact with farmers and vendors as well as the freshness of the products are the main factors, followed by quality, support of the local economy, and to a lesser extent the search for prepared food or arts, crafts, and prepared food. A more recent study based on consumer experience through self-expression on social networks found that consumers valued six major characteristics: #Organic, #Fresh, #Food, #Local, #Vegan, and #Healthy [73], indicating that some consumers had introduced new tendencies in their food choices according to a vegan and zero waste lifestyle.…”

“…For example, McGrath, Sherry Jr and Heisley [57] classify them by the time of day they arrive to the market and by their behavior-whether they shop right away or socialize first, and Hunt [56] divides them according to their motivations-lifestylers, seasonal shoppers, and utilitarians. Pilař et al [73] classify them according to their orientations. Therefore, there is not a single accepted typology of farmers' market consumer.…”