Growing with social media – Tips for the ag industry to engage followers

Let your brand join the party

Presenters were Nora McFarland, of the firm Owl Desk, which helps businesses and individuals create and maintain a social presence on the Internet; Aaron Wockenfuss and Alayna Rivera of Florida Dairy Farmers; and Dr. Tracy Irani and Kevin Kent from the University of Florida’s Center for Public Issues Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources. Each had a unique perspective, and through their presentations they answered the following questions.

Nora McFarland, of the firm Owl Desk, gave tips on social media at the Ag Institute's workshop, "Smart Strategies for Social Media."

McFarland: Facebook has more than 800 million active users. That’s twice the size of the U.S. population. It would be the third largest country after China and India. You want to reach people and engage them. It’s a way to be transparent and accessible.

Irani: It’s a way to encourage dialogue. Focus on two-way communication and you’ll get a favorable return on involvement. It’s a way to tell your story and start a conversation. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will.

Wockenfuss: Most people are far removed from farming. Used properly, social media can bridge the gap between the farm and the consumer. Social media provides a voice for farmers. You can tell your story. It puts a face on the people producing their food. You can monitor conversations around the Web. You can find out the hot topics and what language people are using to discuss them and then talk back using the same terminology rather than language you are used to using, but consumers are not. Another goal of social media is to drive traffic to your website.

Q:  What’s the point of being on different social media sites like Twitter and Facebook?

McFarland: Twitter is the online version of texting. Facebook is where you have a conversation. With Twitter, if someone follows you, it’s good to follow that person. For Facebook, someone can be a fan of your site, but it’s not expected that you will ask that person to be a “friend.” Also with Facebook, you can build a platform to address complaints. It’s better for people to post negative comments on a Facebook page than go elsewhere with their opinions and complaints. And you should be on Linked In as well. It’s a virtual resume. People look for recommendations there and you can show expertise through groups.

Rivera: Facebook is a great place for people to interact. They can comment and look at pictures and videos that we post. It’s a two-way conversation. They say something and we can say something back. Twitter is a great place to share information such as articles and other messages about our industry. And not only are we putting that out to our followers, but when people “re-Tweet” our messages, they go out to however many followers those people have. YouTube videos can be instructional and informative.

Aaron Wockenfuss of Florida Dairy Farmers shared social media success stories with the group.

Q:  How do we get started?

McFarland: For Facebook, it’s very important that you set up your farm or business differently than you would set up your individual page. Don’t create a profile page, because a person would have to ask permission to be a “friend” in order to see your content. Creating a profile page for business is also against Facebook policy. Set up your business as a fan page. It’s also good to divvy up administrators for different duties. For blogging, use younger people or interns, but make sure there are guidelines for them to follow.

Q:  What would be the most important unwritten rules when engaging in social media?

McFarland: Successful fan pages never state the obvious, such as, “Buy our product.” They engage. Coca-Cola does a good job of that. It’s like a party. You don’t want to be “that guy” who always talks about himself. Also, have a predictable variety of posts. Have a trend day, a tech day – that sort of thing. And always bring a human element to Facebook. You can’t be vanilla. Vanilla is good, but how long will people stick around when there’s chocolate and other flavors? And people love “how-tos.”

Rivera: We look at Lexis-Nexis to find out what’s going on in our industry and use that as content to keep our consumers up-to-date. We also use a clipping service to gather information. Also, Google alerts will let you know what’s being said about our industry. If it’s positive, we post it. It’s also important to keep messaging consistent. We can post the same message, basically, on Facebook and Twitter, but it’s appropriate for each channel. On Facebook it can be longer, you can post photos and questions. However, with Twitter it has to be shorter and it’s good to use hashtags and bit.ly to shorten links. We also tag people on Facebook when we mention their names.

Q:  Is it important to have thousands of followers and fans?

Workshop participants benefited from the knowledge and experience of Dr. Traci Irani of the University of Florida’s Center for Public Issues Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Q:  How do we spread the word about our Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites?

Rivera: One of the ways we drive people to our Facebook page is with photos at events. We take pictures of people and upload them to Facebook. We hand out our social media cards and say, hey we’ll have all the pictures up on Monday and you can look at yours, download it, or share it with friends, so that then more people will see our Facebook page. Waivers are necessary, but we have really good results. We then can provide links on Facebook to contests we’re having on our website.

Q:  Should we blog?

McFarland: You can show your expertise by blogging. Use something like Wordpress.com to reserve your user name and make sure you have a great URL. You can check user names at “namecheck.com.”

Q:  Any tips on managing different social media?

Wockenfuss: We have a primary poster for consistency, but it’s important to have a back-up plan. Use different departments for content ideas. Monitor conversations. Use Facebook Analytics, for example.

Irani: When you’re analyzing your social media activity, pay attention to the metrics that make sense to you. Define your success metrics. Quantitative goals can be sales and leads. Qualitative goals can be level of satisfaction or loyalty.

Kent: Filter out strategies and channels that don’t get good returns. Know your audience. Limit your posts and Tweets to about one or two per day. That helps limit the amount of conversations to monitor. Think of the time of day people will be using social media. Complete the bio section for every social network and keep it short. Use Google Analytics and alerts, Facebook Insights, Twitter Statistics and Twitrratr to determine negative versus positive comments.

McFarland: Use Hootsuite and Tweetdeck to manage social media.

Summary:

Each presenter emphasized several points in using social media.

- Engage. The key word is “social”
- The quality of content and followers is more important than the quantity
- Monitor and change your approach when necessary
- Cross-promote sites (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, websites)
- Offer a predictable variety of content
- Be human