With a majority of people in the United States familiar with how networking sites operate, more and more retailers are making use of them to further promote their products, especially the perishable ones.

For instance, Festival Foods of Onalaska, Wisconsin used social media to promote its “Perfect Pairing” campaign. The campaign encouraged participants to post photos of their best campfire recipes on Festival’s Facebook page. Judges will then pick among the posted recipes and photos for the winner of the promotion. Aside from the campaign, Festival previously launched their ‘personalized pizza-making promotion.’ In this campaign, Festival encouraged shoppers to enter the contest and post a photo of their homemade pizza. The dough for this pizza campaign should be one that came from Festival’s in-store bakery in order to qualify for the contest. The photo that garners the most votes on the Facebook page wins the contest.

Aside from Festival Foods, Whole Foods Market also has active social media activity. The grocery chain has a Facebook page that mainly focuses on its meat department. The page features the chain’s rating system for animal welfare. It shows a video that explains the system in five steps. The video also shows the favorable living conditions of the animals. This Facebook page has drawn a number of the chain’s customers who are into animal welfare.

Hannaford Supermarkets in Maine interacts with their customers online through their Twitter account. With more than 2,800 Twitter followers, the grocery chain responds and interacts with their followers tweets from 9 AM to 5 PM, Monday until Friday. This is the company’s way of taking in feedback about their products and the kind of service they provide .