Marvelous metrics: A quantitative content analysis to establish social media benchmarks for Florida fruit and vegetable farms on Facebook

Social media platforms like Facebook offer farms a chance to reach larger audiences and gain connections through online engagement. Previous work demonstrates that online engagement can lead to increased sales. However, much work in tracking benchmarks for social media metrics has been outside of an agricultural context. This study aimed to benchmark the presence of fruit and vegetable farms on social media and the associated metrics (followers, likes, engagement rates, reactions, shares, etc.) to offer a standard of comparison for farms on social media. A quantitative content analysis was used to collect data from 117 farms for general analysis, and a sub-sample of 15 farms was used for a deeper analysis of 1,111 Facebook posts. Results indicate Facebook is the most used platform by Florida fruit and vegetable farms, and photos are the most used post type. Farms with the highest engagement rates posted less than farms with the lowest engagement rate, which indicates that posting more frequently may not increase engagement rates. Implications from this work are that farms may be unique in the social media space and may not need to post during the seasons when they do not have crops available for purchase.