Whole Foods Taking Advantage of Social Media News Outlets
By: Alyssa Serbak, Duquesne University
Whole Foods is a grocery store that seeks out the finest natural and organic foods available, maintain the strictest quality standards in the industry, and have an unshakeable commitment to sustainable agriculture.
Social Media in Today’s Society
With the rising power of social media apps in today’s society, News channels and ways of getting the News out there have much more opportunity. Social media has helped involve more of a younger audience in the news. This helps tremendously when it comes to target audiences and getting news out there to the young audience. As an example, during the election, the news was talking to influencers on social media to push voting in younger adults. Another impact social media has on the news is trends. Trends can be popular things that are influencing many people to take part in them.
Social Media Trends on Grocery Retail Marketing
A way that trends could help out whole foods may be those “That Girl” videos where girls are taking videos of their daily lives that are beneficial to their health, such as going to the gym, eating healthy, and cleaning. A lot of the time, in these “That Girl” videos, the people show themselves going to the grocery store and picking up all of these unique, healthy foods to clean up their eating lifestyle. Two of the most popular grocery stores I have seen in these videos are Trader Joes and well... Whole Foods!
Self-Advertising Thanks To Social Media
Although Whole Foods does not have their own Tik-Tok account to promote new or trending foods, the power of self-advertising comes into play. People take to themselves to promote certain foods from Whole Foods by posting videos going to the grocery store and finding cool, new food, or even making unique recipes with the items from Whole Foods. This can help promote the store by reaching audiences on the Tik-Tok app that may have not been reached by other forms of advertising, and its free! Whole Foods also takes advantage of the social media apps of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Foursquare, and blog.
Good vs. Bad Attention on Whole Foods
Being able to advertise on multiple social media platforms makes Whole Foods appeal to many different audiences, both young and old. When it comes to social media, there is always the positive attention and negative attention. On the good note, Whole Foods has never had any big cases that have negatively impacted them in the news. There is always the possibility of fake news being put out there about a company, but it ends up getting proven fake after a day or so of attention. One news article about Whole Foods that was caused by a misinterpretation on social media was a Tik-Tok by Dumpster Diving Freegan. In this Tik-Tok, Freegan goes to a Whole Foods and dumpster dives, which means he went through the dumpsters to see what he was able to find. In this case, Freegan found nearly 100 loaves of bread thrown out from a single Whole Foods store in one night. In this case, people see this and immediately give negative views to Whole Foods, thinking they have thrown out all of this good bread. Meanwhile, it ended up that the bread was bad or opened, which means it was unable to be sold. Therefore, it needed to be thrown away.
This is an example of how false news can strongly impact a company or even a person in some cases. People would see the Tik-Tok of Whole Foods throwing away all of this bread, and it would cause people to not want to stop at whole foods anymore due to them being wasteful, when in reality, that was not the case. Fortunately for Whole Foods, they have had a lot of positive news stories and Tik-Toks being made about them, which are a good way of promotion. Recently, Whole Foods has been promoted on Tik-Tok by being a super healthy grocery store alternative with unique, healthy foods to give a try. In positive news articles, Whole Foods has had the opportunity to significantly grow since the coronavirus pandemic, and they are actually opening two completely cashier less stores within the year.
Conclusion
All in all, social media influences on the news can have a huge impact on stores, companies, and even people. People say, any attention, negative or positive, is good attention, however in this case, Whole Foods has luckily taken the high road to how they’re being portrayed in the news and on social media!