How to use Facebook to grow your agribusiness venture

When you think of Facebook for your agribusiness, you probably think of Facebook Pages. Facebook pages and groups can boost your Facebook marketing efforts.

Farmers in Kenya have come a long way since the founding of Facebook. They have created numerous groups to help them connect with one another to share ideas across the agribusiness community.

I’ve seen groups organised around causes, events and social groups like book clubs.

But Facebook groups can also be a powerful way for farm owners to connect with their customers and followers, or colleagues in professional organisations.

 In a 2015 earnings call, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg told investors that there were 850 million people using Facebook groups every month.

When you start looking around for groups to join, you might find some that look interesting but are “closed”.

Don’t let that dissuade you from requesting to join. Most of the Facebook groups I’ve looked at happen to be closed but requests to join are answered pretty quickly. Keeping them closed is just a way to keep spammers and trolls out.

Add value

Here are five ways a Facebook group can add value to your agribusiness venture:

Facebook groups help you build community: Being connected in today’s world is very important. Information is power and having the right information at your fingertips can open doors. By being connected, farmers learn from one other, find new products, and create awareness.

Facebook groups can help you promote your product: Before harvesting your produce, you can post them on a Facebook group and inquire if anyone is interested in buying. You will be surprised to find a lot of people interested in what you are selling.

Facebook groups can keep you organised: Facebook groups can be useful for community building and product promotion, but it also has some features built in that can make groups even more powerful.

Let’s say you’re planning an agribusiness training event for your group and you want to know what type of training members are interested in. You could use the “Questions” feature to poll members about their preference, ask them to choose from a list of options.

Create event

Once you’ve settled on what type of training to host, use Facebook’s “Create Event” feature to schedule it and collect RSVPs.

Just click the icon in the top right-hand corner of your group, create an event from the dropdown menu by adding details and click “Create.” (If your group has fewer than 250 members, you can invite everyone to your event all at once. To invite more than 250, you’ll have to choose invitees individually.)

You can also post files you’d like to share with group members, eg documents and presentations. All you have to do is click the “Add File” icon (you can also share dropbox files).

Prominent Kenyan farming groups on Facebook are Digital Farmers Kenya with a membership of 84,154 and Onion & Watermelon Farming Gurus with a membership of 74,990 as at May 24, 2017.

[Joseph Boit, the writer, is the brains behind the Graduate Farmer website and the 2016  BAKE Award Agriculture category winner]