An Interview with Yorkshire Tea!

I don’t know about you, but we are massive fans of a ‘proper brew’, especially when it reaches ‘tea o’ clock’. Yorkshire Tea have a wonderful blog, and successful social media channels. We speak to Tom Hay, Yorkshire Tea’s in-house copy writer and social media guy, to give us an insider’s view:

Yorkshire Tea is a well-loved and very traditionally British brand. How have you made this work in the scary new world of social media and blogging?

We’ve really just try to be ourselves. Our tone on social media is a lot like the tone of our customer services dept – nice, polite and honest. It does help that people are usually nice, polite and honest to us too.

I can see you encourage consumer and blogger engagement, as well as guest posts and personal stories on your blog. How do you choose what type of content to post?

It’s a nice company and it does a lot of good stuff, so you don’t need any corporate airbrushing – we just keep an eye out for interesting things that are happening, or take a look behind the scenes at production, and tell people about that. As for the occasional guest blogs (or indeed the many pictures people send us that we share on Facebook, or the tweets we retweet) we don’t really have a big plan or a strategy. Sometimes it just feels like it’ll fit.

What was the inspiration behind the ‘Yorkshire Tea Song’? It’s hilarious!

We wanted to capture the spirit of tea drinkers’ love for a good brew – and throw a few jokes in there so that people might share it with their friends!

Are you thinking of expanding your Yorkshire Tea product range?

We don’t have plans for that at the moment – but we are going to be shining a bit of a spotlight on other parts of the range next year, in the hope of getting more people to try out Yorkshire Gold, Yorkshire Tea Decaf and (if they live in a hard water area) Yorkshire Tea for Hard Water.

Any blogging or social media tips for small businesses and bloggers?

Try to avoid giving it the hard sell, and don’t worry if you don’t get a ton of attention right away.

What are your tips for making the perfect brew?

We’ll hand over to one of our tea buyers, Suzy, for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-zmjLd67k0

So there you have it! Check out Yorkshire Tea’s blog here: http://www.yorkshiretea.co.uk/blog/ and follow them on Twitter