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THE head of a premium organic smoked salmon company has revealed how social networking sites like Facebook are helping to grow sales.
Declan Droney, owner and manager of Galway-based Kinvara, told the Humber Seafood Summit in Grimsby that it can be an innovative way of getting people to talk about a product But for Kinvara it has helped sales grow by 25 per cent year on year until the recession hit recently.
Kinvara was founded less than a decade ago, and actually doesn't produce any salmon itself. Instead it buys in quality fish from around 20 quality organic salmon specialists in the west of Ireland. The fish are fed organic feed, but the real key to quality is that they have a much larger area in which to swim and the cages are kept up to four miles off the coast which helps to make them leaner and perfect for smoking.
He said that the products are proving a hit in the UK and is now on the shelves of leading stores like Selfridges and Waitrose, and it was recently voted the best smoked salmon by the BBC Good Food Magazine.
Declan said the company got off to a good start because it was founded just as organic food was becoming really fashionable; secondly the products which also include pates and Gravdlax, received a lot of positive press coverage.
The company had also built up a date base of its customers which helped Kinvara keep in touch with them. But it was now using social sites such as Facebook and Twitter to maintain this close relation, with the result that it had built up a base of thousands of web "fans". It was strategy already being used by major companies such as Marmite and Guinness. He added: "Building a brand is not a destination - it is a journey."
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