Farmers’ Markets: Positive Feelings of Instagram Posts

• Main Authors: Ladislav Pilař, Tereza Balcarová, Stanislav Rojík
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Mendel University Press 2016-01-01
• Series: Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis
• Subjects: farmers’ market; social media; instagram; positive feelings; healthy; local
• Online Access: https://acta.mendelu.cz/64/6/2095/

With increasing consumer requirements, farmers and vendors see the importance of social media as a marketing tool to engage with consumers. In particular, on a more personal level for reasons of brand management. Instagram is becoming increasingly popular as a marketing communication tool. The aim of this paper is to identify areas that users evaluate in terms of positive feelings in connection with farmers’ markets. The results are based on the analysis of the worldwide, and Czech, instagram social network. Instagram posts were identified on the basis of keywords, such as #farmarsketrhy and #farmersmarkets. The results of the study are based on 100,000 contributions on Instagram made by 55,632 users. The analysis contains 1,357,812 ‘unique’ words. The results identified six major areas (1) Healthy (2) Good (3) Great (4) Happy (5) Nice (6) Perfect. An appropriately posted hashtag indicated the positive feelings that were evoked and then assigned to a matching category. The research results are used to identify group characteristics that exert these positive feelings while visiting farmers’ markets. These results can be used to build communications campaigns for farmers’ markets. They can also be used as a basis for further research in defining the behaviour of farmers’ markets visitors, based on cultural differences arising from geographic location.