Of course farmers are on social networks, both privately and professionally! It’s no longer a question. And the farming world as a whole is present, and very active indeed. To make the most of this now indispensable channel, however, you need to master a few basics.
Communicating on social networks can pay dividends in agriculture. They give you greater visibility and help you to promote your activities, products and services. They facilitate exchanges and can consolidate or lead to collaborations. But communicating via networks requires methodology, regularity and patience. It’s not always easy to understand the rules of this virtual world. And sometimes you have to wait to see real results. To achieve your objectives via the networks, it is advisable to put in place an action plan.
Acontent strategy
The risk of starting out without an editorial strategy is that you will spread yourself too thin, run out of steam quickly and even lose the meaning of the approach. The ideal is to build a real content strategy with pillars and sections. This editorial strategy will itself be linked to an overall communication strategy. To establish it, you need to start from the strategic objectives and the brand platform, which will provide the editorial foundations, a scope and a discourse. Devising a strategy requires a thorough understanding of your target audience and your objectives. Ideally, these objectives should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. This will determine the choice of communication techniques, types of content and social media.
Choosing the right network
In first place, in the agricultural sphere, are Youtube and Facebook, with 60% and 54% of registered agrinautes respectively (Study agrinautes 2022). Twitter offers the possibility of reaching agricultural leaders and highly connected farmers. LinkedIn can also be used when it comes to agriculture, as it is the professional network par excellence. Farmers are less present there, but it does reach those with management concerns, in particular. Although Instagram is more for the general public, some agricultural brands are seeing their communities grow. As for Snapchat or Tiktok, it’s worth looking into them if young people are a strategic target for you. You’ll need to adapt to the specific codes associated with these networks.
Organising an editorial calendar
Once the editorial strategy has been established, all that remains is to organise the production, validation and publication of the content. If you work in a team and rely on internal or external resources, the easiest thing to do is to set up a meeting or an editorial committee that meets regularly. This committee validates ideas, appoints writers and sets publication dates. It’s up to the community manager to drive this communication and ensure that it gets out. Anticipation, rigour and creativity are the watchwords for this exercise.
Certain publication days and times are more popular than others. So you need to set up an editorial calendar. The best way is to make up your own mind by analysing your statistics either on the network dashboard or using an optimisation tool.
Always on standby
Having a presence on social networks means keeping an eye on what’s going on globally, to ensure that you are keeping a professional watch and also on what is being said about your company or brand. It is also essential to keep a constant watch on your own pages. It is strongly recommended that you reply to comments, even negative ones, or, if necessary, that you indicate that you are taking the comment seriously and that you are switching to private mode to talk to the person. Bad buzz doesn’t just happen to other people, and very often the crisis emerges via social networks.