When you’re farming it can feel like there’s not a moment to spare for anything besides working in the field but if you’re looking to grow your farming business, social media is my top recommendation.

We’ve entered a period of time where more and more consumers are heading to the internet and social media to get answers on where their food is coming from and how it’s being produced so it’s important that your farm can be found online.

Ask yourself, what’s the best part about shopping at your local farmers market?

Sure fresh and seasonal produce is great, but let’s face it, you can find that in boutique grocery stores. The best part is actually getting to connect to the farmers who are growing and producing the food you’re feeding your family!

Social media allows you to do just that, share your story and connect with the community to grow support around your business.

Now this is a huge topic and one I can’t possibly cover in one blog post but below I’ll share a few do’s and don’t I’d love you to consider while you build an online presence on social media.

Don’t just sell to people

Nobody, I repeat nobody, wants to be sold to the whole time they’re on Facebook or Instagram so don’t simply post about every market you’re attending, product you carry, sale you’re having. The wise Gary Vaynerchuck describes it best, when communicating with your customers, it should be a jab, jab, jab, right hook! That means for every one selling post you’d like to share, you need to ‘jab’ your community at least 3 times with content that’s simply there to educate or entertain your following.

Do respond you people’s comments

Social media is meant to be social, it’s a two way street where you want to open up dialog to and communicate with your community… not just talk at them. I know it might seem daunting to have to respond to each and every comment and direct message that comes your way but I promise, it’s worth the time to grow support around your farm. This two way communication is important for a few reasons, firstly it’s great for the algorithms because every time someone, yourself included, comments on one of your posts it tells Facebook and Instagram that your content is being enjoyed and that encourages the platforms to show your posts to more people expanding your reach. Secondly, it also encourages people to comment again in the future. Let’s face it, if you kept taking the time to write a thoughtful comment of a business’ posts and they NEVER acknowledged you, how long before you’d simply stop bothering with it?

Don’t share information that can put you and your property at risk

Be sure to use common sense online, especially since many of our farms are also our homes. I am extremely careful to not share when my other half Jay goes out of town leaving me home alone, I don’t share information on the school our kids attend including photos of them in school jerseys, and I’m conscious to casually include posts involving our farm hands when we’re away from the farm on holidays to remind anyone watching that the farm is still being monitored 24 hours a day. The key is to do this in a casual manner so that all the honest people who follow you don’t feel like you think you can’t trust your community.

Do share content created by others

Making all your own content can be super time consuming and frankly unnecessary. I’m always on the hunt for other people’s content that I can share but the key is to ALWAYS give credit where credit is do. If a fellow farmer wrote a great blog post you can share to your Facebook page, share it just be sure tag them in the caption you write. One of my favourites is to encourage my customers to tag me in photos of the meals they made with our products so I can share the pictures on our Instagram and give them a shout out — Customers love getting to show off what they’ve been up to in the kitchen.

Now here’s where it gets tricky, if you see a third party article that you love being shared by another business, technically it’s fair game to share without tagging that farm in the post since it isn’t their content (perhaps it’s a news article from the NY Times) but I still like to tag them. It could be as simple as ‘I saw this article shared over on @FarmABC, and thought you'd like to read it too’ and then continue with a few lines about why you think it’s a valuable read for your community. That way no one can ever accuse you of getting your post ideas from someone else’s page because you’re sharing where you originally saw the post and giving them a shout out.

In the end, to successfully grow a community on social media it’s important to be authentic to yourself and your business and take the time to build relationships with both the community and fellow farmers and businesses. I’ll leave you with this little stat on my farm, on weeks that for whatever reason I’ve taken a break from social media I see an average drop in sales of 66%, so I know social media is the driving factor in our success.

Once you get on a roll, you’ll absolutely see financial returns on your time!