Farming the Online Community: Your Guide to Social Media
Facebook. YouTube. Twitter. LinkedIn. Digg. Farmers. Wait – how do farmers fit with all of these new-fangled tools? Welcome to 2009 and the age of social media. Studies show that four out of five online Americans are active in some form of social content at least once a month. Believe it or not, you’ve been a part of the Web 2.0 social media revolution if you’ve been on e-bay, blogs, photo sharing websites or forums interacting with others. Now it’s time for you to tap into social media to impact your bottom line though access to soybean and other market intelligence, technical expertise, discussions with other farmers and consumer thought patterns about farming.
You’ve likely calculated your harvest success based upon yields, market conditions, input costs and other return on investment measurements. I encourage you to consider yield measurements beyond combines and grain bins. One of those areas is consumer understanding about agriculture, such as why we need to improve soybean yields. Look at the long-term yield opportunity if the non-ag public understands these types of critical issues.
- What are the benefits of using biotechnology?
- How have soybean farmers reduced their environmental impact?
- Why do farm productivity improvements help consumers?
- How does your farm view sustainability?
- Why do you farm and what does it means to your family?
You can farm your online community to communicate with the non-farm public about these issues. The quantity of people engaged in social media clearly illustrates the opportunity to connect farmers with the 98.5% of the U.S. population not actively involved with a farm. The number of Facebook users now exceeds the U.S. population, over two million tweets (140 character messages), are sent daily on Twitter and there are 20 hours of video uploaded every minute of every day on YouTube.
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