We know using social media marketing for your farm or agriculture business can be daunting. It’s like a black box that seems untouchable.
But don’t worry, we created this guide to break it down for you. We want to introduce you to the different social media platforms and inspire you to take control of your social media marketing today. We’ve also included a number of social media farm captions and other farm Instagram post ideas that you can copy directly into your social media business accounts. It’s as easy as copy and paste!
Yes! Social media has become an integral part of digital marketing for many businesses.
For farmers, social media can be a dynamic platform to engage with customers, highlight fresh produce for sale, and market meat online.
Social media marketing for farmers is no longer optional, but an essential way to reach your customers, gain valuable insights, and increase sales to your online farm store.
As of 2024, there are approximately 5.17 billion social media users worldwide, which represents about 63.7% of the global population. What better way than to connect with your existing customers and find new ones than social media? Having a great social media presence increases your visibility and unifies your brand.
Farmers are often scared that moving online will decrease their connections with their customers. This is not the case! Social media allows your customers to have a sneak peek into your business, connect with you via Facebook Messenger, social media DMs (direct messages) or comments, and stay on top of what you’re up to.
One of the biggest advantages of social media marketing is its ability to drive sales. With increased exposure and multiple ways to engage with your audience across different platforms, social media creates more touchpoints between you and your customers. This consistent interaction not only builds trust but also leads to more sales opportunities.
👉 Gain valuable insights, tips and tricks on farmer selling and marketing with our book: Download Ready Farmer One!
The goal of your Instagram business account should be to connect and engage with people who want to buy your farm products. With 2 billion active monthly users on Instagram spending an average of 28 minutes daily on the platform (according to Hootsuite), there is a serious opportunity to grow your following and get customers from Instagram.
In this section, we’ll share our top tips to help you grow your farm’s presence on Instagram and attract more buyers.
Setting up an Instagram account for your farm is quick and easy. Here’s a simple guide to help you get started:
👉 Check out how to create an engaging Instagram profile for a farm business.
Managing an Instagram business account can feel overwhelming when deciding what to post. To simplify things, here’s an overview of the key Instagram elements: posts, stories, reels, and Instagram Live.
Each element offers a unique way to engage your audience and build a stronger connection with potential buyers.
The key to an effective Instagram business profile is consistency in what type of content you post. You’ll draw more people to your page if there is a clear quality and theme in your pictures and videos. Instagram is all about aesthetics - so learn how to take great farm photos for Instagram!
To ensure you’re sticking to a cohesive Instagram theme, try using the Instagram 5 method.
The Instagram 5 method is a content strategy that involves selecting five categories or themes to maintain consistency and variety, ensuring your feed stays cohesive and engaging.
Below, we outline the steps to implement the Instagram 5 method on any farm or agriculture-focused Instagram account.
The first step is to choose the type of content you want to share on your Instagram page and the theme you're going for. Segment that into five different categories.
For example, your 5 Instagram theme ideas or categories could be:
After you’ve selected your categories, you need to choose what type of content falls into each category. By this, we mean, that for the family category, you’ll only post photos. For the product promotion, you use a variety of graphics, photos, and videos.
The trick to the Instagram 5 is to alternate each category per post. For example, your pattern could be Animals, Product Promotion, The Farm, Family, and Funny Pictures.
Having a set pattern makes brainstorming content super straightforward and ensures that your Instagram grid layout looks balanced.
An Instagram grid layout refers to the overall design and arrangement of images on your Instagram profile’s main feed. It focuses on how individual posts are visually aligned in rows of three, creating a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing look. By carefully planning the sequence of posts, you can can create patterns, color schemes, or storytelling elements that improve the overall appearance of your profile.
An Instagram post is a photo or video that an Instagram user shares on the platform. It is the main way to add content to your Instagram page. All your posts will be accumulated into one page displayed as a grid. Your grid gives a quick overview of your business.
Feature one product as the product of the week/month. Be sure to add an awesome product description and why it’s featured this month, i.e. staff pick or in season! Even consider adding a special promo deal to increase sales. You can repeat this post on a weekly or monthly basis.
Many people are very interested in what a morning looks like at a farm. Post multiple photos or videos of waking up, feeding the animals, walking through the fields - whatever mornings look like for you! Use the description to make a quick list of everything you do to prepare for your day. Your followers will love it!
Don’t forget to introduce yourself and your team to your followers. If you’ve recently seen a huge increase in followers, it can be a great time to do an introduction post! Add a nice photo of yourself and a little background about you and why you do what you do! End the description with a question for your followers to get them engaged; for example, what’s your favourite product we sell?
Social proof is the best form of marketing! Look into who’s tagging your business or location to their IG photos, and share those directly to your feed (if they’re nice photos, of course!).
Your “why” is your reason for doing what you’re doing.
Why did you start farming? What values does your business have? What image would best answer that question? Tell your story and pick an image to go along with it.
Get the season started by sharing some photos and videos from planting season. Let your followers know what’s growing this year by giving an overview of the planting process and a timeline of when their favourite products will be back in action.
This idea is pretty broad - but it is what your customers want to see. They want to know about you, what you guys do, and how their food is grown. Post high-quality photos of your different animals, crops, team or family members - whatever makes the most sense for your business. And then add a short and sweet story that goes along with the photo. Letting your customers into your life and farm will increase the bond they feel with your business. As you always hear, it’s essential to know your farmer - this way your customers can feel like they are.
You could even make it a series and call it Fridays on the Farm!
Using hashtags is a great way to increase the visibility of your posts and connect with a larger audience interested in farming, sustainability, and local food. By incorporating the right hashtags, you can reach people who are actively searching for farm-related content.
Here’s a list of popular farmer-related hashtags for Instagram you can use on your Instagram posts and captions:
Instagram Stories lets Instagram accounts post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. This slideshow reel of photos and videos will disappear after 24 hours. They are a quick, easy way to share moments and experiences and talk directly to your followers. The program allows you to use text, music, stickers and GIFs to bring your story to life.
New product coming soon to your online store? Use stories to tease a new product launching soon! This drives interest and anticipation for your products and allows you to interact with your customers directly.
Post a picture of a few ingredients, packaging, or the product in the field close up. Let your customers guess what’s coming soon to your store.
Use stories to break down an interview with your team! Your customers want to know more about what goes into producing your products. Do a quick interview with your team members, asking them questions like:
Break down your favourite moments from the interview by featuring quotes, photos, or even little clips of the interviewer. Even consider doing this as a weekly series with different staff or even customers! Interview quotes are a great way to promote social proof.
Get your customers involved and ask for their opinions! Take a photo or use a graphic asking your audience the question “this or that”?
Everybody loves free stuff! Put an ask out on your stories by asking customers to share their seasonal or product photos. Everyone who submits a photo using your set hashtag (#) will get entered into a drawing for a voucher or free product with their next order.
Are you running this around a big holiday? You could even give away a free holiday basket featuring seasonal products! The bigger the reward, the greater the participation AND the more exposure for your business! #winning!
Veggies can be hard to keep fresh in the fridge (unless you’re an expert 😉). Use your stories to provide your tips to customers on the best ways to extend the shelf life of their favourite products. For example, where to store them (in the fridge or out), how to store them, and when they are at their prime!
Offer your Instagram followers an exclusive discount through your stories.
Share farm coupon codes that customers can use for a limited time on your online store or at a farmers market. Make the offer time-sensitive to encourage immediate action and increase sales. You can create urgency by using phrases like “24-hour flash sale” or “Use code FARMFRESH for 15% off your next order!” This is a great way to reward your loyal followers while driving more traffic to your store.
Similar to the TikTok format, Reels are Instagram’s new way of sharing video content. The feature allows you to create multi-clip videos for up to 30 seconds, and get creative with easy-to-use text, AR filters and audio. You can film directly on the platform or upload pre-recorded videos from your gallery too!
Inspire sales by showing off five must-buys you’re selling this week! Film five quick, high-quality clips of each product. Use text overlay to add product names and facts about the products.
Reels can be a great tool to do quick and easy tutorials for your audience. Your followers want short content that can inspire them. Film and edit a quick and easy tutorial for a recipe, or gardening or household tip.
Connect directly with your audience by going live with Instagram Live! Instagram Live lets you broadcast video to your followers in real-time as part of Instagram Stories. Followers can like and comment directly onto After your Live is done, you can save it to your highlights on Instagram stories.
Answer all those questions your customers are wondering! Use the Instagram Live feature to go “live” with your customers and connect with them directly. With this feature, your followers can join in and ask questions through the chat feature.
Be sure to promote your Q and A beforehand using stories to make sure followers know when to tune in to see you go live! Consider asking followers to submit questions through the questions sticker in stories.
Get your customers in the kitchen with you! Host a cooking class online through Instagram Live. Share the date and time, and ingredients needed and invite your followers to join you to make your favourite dishes featuring your products.
Your Facebook page is designed to promote your business. Think of your Facebook page as a digital home for your business. Facebook is a popular place for customers to search your business, learn more about what you do, and find contact information. Often, they’ll search you on Facebook even more searching for you on Google!
Be sure to spend time on updating your Facebook page to include:
This will ensure your customers have all the information they’re looking for immediately.
After you’ve optimized your Facebook page, it’s time to start filling it with content! To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of content ideas for the different elements of the platform: posts, stories, and Facebook Live.
People love to see how their food is produced. Show your customers a little behind-the-scenes on the production of their favourite products. The beauty of Facebook posts is that you’re able to post a few pictures in one post.
Facebook is a great place to tell stories. If you have a funny anecdote from their farm, write it down and share it as a Facebook post. Tell your own stories of how your business came to be, share hard parts of being a business owner, or even a short story about how you collect eggs in the mornings! Telling stories is a great way to connect with your audience.
Take it a step further, and ask your customers to share their stories below in the comments!
Facebook posts are a great place to share your harvest of the week. Share high-quality photos of products that are for sale this week, along with instructions on how to order! Also, be sure to include a link to your online store or website.
Infographics can be a great way to inform your customers. There’s a lot to learn about different farming styles or production methods. If you’re looking for a quick way to let your customers know why your production is different, put it in a quick infographic. Don’t have time to create one yourself, there’s always plenty to find online that you can reshare.
Many businesses write blog posts to offer value to their customers. Blog posts could include everything from an opinion piece on a certain trend or topic, or your family recipe for a special holiday dish. If you are an avid blog writer, use your Facebook page to promote your content!
Facebook is a great place to ask for feedback. The poll feature allows you to ask for preferences amongst your audience. Run a poll to ask if customers would want a different pick up time or delivery location. You could even ask them what their favorite product is. Whatever feedback you’re looking for, ask it here.
If you’re running certain promotions, giveaways, or contests, be sure to promote them on your Facebook page. A possible contest could be to share product photos, recipes, or even just to tag three of their closest friends to the post. Customers are able to like and comment directly on your post, so be sure to encourage engagement.
We recommend trying to differentiate your Facebook content from your Instagram posts. Due to the nature of Facebook, you have a lot more flexibility in the type of content you post (i.e. resharing YouTube videos, polls, links) and the length of the posts themselves. Instagram is all about the visuals!
BUT, if you don’t have time to create different content for each platform, you can reshare your Instagram posts directly onto your Facebook page! The two social media platforms are linked, so this is definitely an option!
Promote your presence at the local farmers market by sharing updates on your Facebook page.
You can create a post with photos of your market setup, highlight special products you're selling, and remind customers of the market's location and hours. Encourage followers to visit and support local farmers while sharing any exclusive deals or offerings for the market day.
Engaging with your audience this way helps drive traffic to your stall and builds a sense of community around your brand.
Similar to Instagram Stories, Facebook also has a Stories feature. This feature allows you to post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. They are a quick, easy way to share moments and experiences, and talk directly to your followers.
Already posted a few stories on Instagram? Send them directly to Facebook by sharing the same stories on both platforms.
New product coming soon to your online store? Use stories to tease a new product launching soon! This drives interest and anticipation for your products and allows you to interact with your customers directly.
Post a picture of a few ingredients, packaging, or the product in the field close-up. Let your customers guess what’s coming soon to your store.
Use stories to break down an interview with your team! Your customers want to know more about what goes into producing your products. Do a quick interview with your team members, asking them questions like:
Break down your favourite moments from the interview by featuring quotes, photos, or even little clips of the interviewer. Even consider doing this as a weekly series with different staff or even customers! Interview quotes are a great way to promote social proof.
Get your customers involved and ask for their opinions! Take a photo or use a graphic asking your audience the question “this or that”?
Everybody loves free stuff! Put an ask out on your stories by asking customers to share their seasonal or product photos. Everyone who submits a photo using your set hashtag (#) will get entered into a drawing for a voucher or free product with their next order.
Are you running this around a big holiday? You could even give away a free holiday basket featuring seasonal products! The bigger the reward, the greater the participation AND the more exposure for your business! #winning!
Veggies can be hard to keep fresh in the fridge (unless you’re an expert 😉). Use your stories to provide your tips to customers on the best ways to extend the shelf life of their favourite products. For example, where to store them (in the fridge or out), how to store them, and when they are at their prime!
Even if you’re not on TikTok, you’ve most definitely seen a video from this incredibly popular social media platform. Its focus is on short, bite-sized videos that are used to entertain, educate, and inspire.
From a marketing perspective, TikTok is a platform where your main metric is brand awareness. The app is expected to surpass 2 billion users by the end of 2024.
Because TikTok doesn’t directly hyperlink posts to websites, the goal is views and viewer engagement. You can include a website and hyperlink to your Instagram in your profile, so be sure to take advantage of these key opportunities to drive traffic to your website!
With TikTok’s incredibly fast growth and popularity, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. We recommend getting started on this app sooner than later. The good news? It’s fairly new, and now is a great time to experiment with it.
The one thing to keep in mind when it comes to TikTok: be authentic. The app is all about imperfection and being real! Videos that show your process, your personality, and the behind-the-scenes will do exponentially better than videos that are very curated.
We have a variety of TikTok content ideas to share that can be used for your business’ video strategy—try them and learn what works for your audience!
As of 2024, there are about 50,000 farmers worldwide using TikTok.
While not all of them are actively posting content, many do share valuable insights into their daily lives and various sectors of agriculture, offering a unique perspective on farming to a broad audience.
If you’re not a regular user, familiarize yourself with the app. Go to the “For You” section of the main feed, and see what others are posting. You can use the Discover tab (similar to Instagram) to search for videos similar to yours. How are other farmers or local producers creating content? What videos are they sharing? (Note: it can be challenging to search for videos on TikTok; the main element that returns search results are hashtags. Be sure to use these in each of your posted videos.)
Create some draft videos, use the filters and stickers, and get comfortable using the platform.
This one is easy—your profile will be all about your business! It sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s easier to get creative and make an impact when you have a specific video niche that your content follows.
When you have a niche, your ideal audience will find you, engage with what you’re sharing, and know what to expect from you. As your community grows, you’ll be able to direct them off of the app and onto your website or online store.
How often will you post on TikTok? We share a little more detail about how often to post on social in the “Social Strategy” section of this guide, but a good rule of thumb is to be consistent. Some content creators post 3 to even 10 videos per day on TikTok, but that’s not recommended (or even sustainable).
We suggest aiming to post 2–3 times a week. TikTok will reward your account for being consistent, so if you can maintain a regular post schedule, your videos will get in front of who they need to without sharing more videos.
The great thing about creating content for TikTok is that it can—and should!—live beyond just this platform. Save time and reuse your content for Instagram Reels and Stories, and Facebook Stories as well.
If your Instagram or Facebook audience isn’t on TikTok, you’ll want them to see what you’re sharing there, too!
Here’s how:
Need some inspiration for your own account. Here are some popular types of TikTok videos:
Because TikTok trends change so quickly—and pop up without warning—it’s important to take advantage of them as soon as you can. Plan your evergreen content (like tutorials, a day-in-the-life), while keeping your content schedule flexible to accommodate trends and video memes as they occur.
Here are seven days of TikTok content for you to record and share!
Batch recording and editing is the best way to maximize your time spent creating videos. It’s a time consuming process!
Take advantage of TikTok’s ability to upload pre-recorded videos. Have a plan for which videos you’d like to create, and then use your smartphone to record clips throughout the day that you know you’ll use in one, two, or more videos later on. For example: maybe you’re filming a day-in-the-life, a video showing you packaging orders, and a video tour of the market. Take clips throughout the day, and when you have a chance, piece together the clips in TikTok to make three videos!
Social media is a science (as they like to say), so having a clear social media strategy is very important! A social media strategy is a quick summary of your plan of action for how you want to post on these platforms. It guides your actions and allows you to reflect on how it’s going.
It doesn’t have to be lengthy or extensive, but rather a clear overview on what you want to achieve on social media.
Here are six steps to quickly (and painlessly) create your farm social media strategy today.
The first step for setting up a social media strategy is to set goals. Like any new project, you want to define your desired end result before starting. What do you want to achieve with your social media? Do you want to get more customers? Do you want to connect with existing customers? Do you want to increase your brand awareness?
Each business will be different. But whatever your goals, be sure to set relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and farm metrics for each goal. For example:
Goal: Increase Brand awareness
KPI: Grow to 500 Instagram followers.
Hootsuite provides a great overview of on how to set goals and measure them with this table:
After you’ve set your goals, you now need to define what tools you’ll need to get started. First, choose your platforms. You don’t have to use all of the social media platforms available to you. You need to select the platforms where your customers are and where you think you can succeed. We highly recommend at the least, you create a Facebook business page as it increases business legitimacy.
After you’ve selected your platforms, take some time to get to know them. Most social media tools (such as Facebook, TikTok, X / Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Instagram) offer a variety of helpful analytics tools that allow you to deep dive into the numbers. Take some time to understand what reports you can see and what they mean. Understanding how your audience interacts with your content can help you ensure you optimize your content to increase views and engagement. There are many resources available online to help you understand the interesting world of social media analytics, so be sure to use Google!
Then, you need to select any other tools that can help you succeed. Here are some tools/resources we recommend.
These management tools allow you to schedule out social media posts to go out at desired times. This can save you so much time from having to manually post. Schedule everything for the week or month on a Sunday and let the tool do the rest for you. Here are some of the best social media management platforms:
Many of us are not graphic designers. Luckily there are free platforms available that allow you to drag and drop different graphics, fonts, and more to create engaging and beautiful graphics to use on social media. Our favourite is Canva! They offer a free account.
Stock photos can be used to create different graphics or add to different posts if you can’t take the photos yourself. Here are some websites that offer free stock photos:
Before starting with your new social media strategy, it’s important to audit your existing social media channels (if applicable). Ask yourself:
Understanding what works (or doesn’t work) for your business is the first step to a successful social media strategy. You can even compare the results of your audit to your goals. How do you need to change your current strategy to achieve your goals?
You want consistent branding across your social media channels.
Go through your existing social media accounts and make sure all of the logos, colours, and wording match. Be sure to include relevant and updated links and contact information. If you have a farm website, make sure that the branding and imagery on your website matches your social media.
A content calendar is a marketing tool to help you get organized! It can be as complex or as simple as you would like it to be, but it helps you know what you need to post and when. If you take the time early on to plan out your content, it will save you so much time during the week! To set up a content calendar, you can use a variety of tools! Start out with an excel spreadsheet to get organized.
👉 Download our social media content calendar template for farmers.
If you want to take it a step further, you can even consider using a project management tool such as Asana , ClickUp, Monday, or Trello. The social media management platforms mentioned above (Buffer, Later, and Hootsuite) are also perfect for the job! Play around with the different options to see what works best for you!
You’ve put in all the work to create your social media strategy and content calendar - now it’s time to keep it up! Try to keep to your content calendar for at least a month to see results. After a month, if you’re not able to keep up or you want to post more, re-evaluate your content calendar and try again!
Be sure to regularly check and analyze your metrics and indicators to determine whether things are working! If you don’t track it, you’ll never know if your hard work is paying off.
We can say that consistency is key with most things, and the same is certainly true for social media. You want to be seen as reliable enough that you deserve to be followed, and provide enough value to your followers to encourage them to interact with you.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you need to be posting every hour on the hour (actually, the opposite is true). Posting on a regular basis allows more opportunities for your followers and target audience to interact with your content. The fabled “algorithm” on platforms like Instagram favours interactions over volume of posts, as well as accounts that are posting consistently. This means that you will be ranked as more “relevant” on your followers’ feeds, and in the discovery functions of each platform. A good rule of thumb is to post 3-5 or so times per week on any feeds (the “always there” content on Instagram or Facebook) about something that is core to your story or business. This is where your main, high-level messaging goes.
Stories can be seen as complementary to your posts, and are best served by the “day-to-day” updates, fun or funny moments in the day, and add an accessible, down-to-earth feel to your channel. These can be as often as you like (we would suggest at least a few stories per week to start).
These are suggested guidelines for posting frequency, but be sure to know what is realistic for your business. If you only have time to post on social 1-2 times per week, that’s always better than not posting at all! Be sure to set realistic goals for your business and capacity, so that you stick to them. If you’re too ambitious from the start, it might result in you falling behind or posting poor-quality content.
This guide is a starting point for your social media journey, and we're excited to introduce you to even more opportunities. At Local Line, we don't just stop at social media guidance; we empower you to take your farm business to the next level.
In addition to our valuable insights on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, we offer a comprehensive solution to build your very own e-commerce farm website through Local Line. We understand the importance of a strong online presence for your farm, and with our platform, you can easily create a professional farm website to showcase your products and reach a wider audience.
So, don't stop here. Explore the world of social media marketing with the foundation you've gained from this guide, and when you're ready to take your farm's online presence to new heights, trust Local Line to be your partner in success. Start building your e-commerce farm website and enhancing your social media strategies today.
➡️ Looking for more farm marketing tips? Download our guide to 365 days of marketing!
.webp)