Nowadays, nearly everything we do operates online, from shopping to keeping up with friends and family. Whether you want to add a little income or find like-minded people, you can harness social media to promote your homestead.
Using social media, you can market your produce, meat, and crafts, or attract people to come and visit your homestead. You can also find advertisers, if you get enough followers, and have a supplemental income stream.
Here’s how to promote your homestead successfully on social media.
Options for Promoting Your Homestead or Farm
Depending on your situation, you could make money from homegrown products like fruit and vegetables, your homemade soaps, goat milk, or a small petting zoo. But, as many farms are located in remote areas, it can be hard to get your name out there.
If you want to live off your products and promote your homestead, you can market your business in several ways. For instance, if you live in a small community where people know each other, you can start making new connections and get your brand out via word of mouth.
You can spread your name by printing business cards and handing them out to local businesses. Or, you can leave a bunch in a local cafe so people can pick up a card when they go for a coffee or meet friends in town.
You can place an ad in a local newspaper. If there isn’t a local newspaper, you can also contact the local farmer’s market and set up a stall to display your products and talk to customers.
Anything you can do to build a personal connection will make you stand out from your competition and get noticed. And the easiest way to do this is with the help of social media. You don’t need to print materials, set up a stall, or hand out market flyers.
Instead, you can put your time towards building a strong online presence and connecting with customers on social media.
With social media, you can also attract advertisers who will offer you free products or will pay you to promote their products.
Tips for Using Social Media for Your Homestead or Farm
One of the main selling points of farms and homesteads is their visuals. Everyone loves petting a baby cow in the countryside or picking up fresh milk from a friendly farm. Are you going to focus on ultra-fresh produce? Cut flowers? Knitted goods? Herbal remedies?
You need to nail down your brand voice when you set up a social media account. Then, you need to post in a way that attracts viewers and gets promoted in the social media algorithm. Here’s how:
1. Build a Brand
Like other marketing methods, you need a strong brand concept to create a coherent strategy that gets you more money and builds a loyal online community. For example, you should think about the following when building a brand:
- Is your farm family-owned? Or is it a shared property?
- What are your best products?
- Do you want to cater to corporations, small businesses, or individuals?
- Where is your farm located? What makes it special?
- Can you think of one or two aspects that make your farm different?
- Are you going to focus on one product? Multiple? Or do you want to sell farm life rather than a product?
- What are your values? Why should people trust and support you?
These points will help you get started with your brand concept and give you an outline for going forward and creating social media posts. Once you’ve determined what kind of brand you want to be, you should also think about your clients.
You need to decide if you want to connect with local people in your area or if you want to reach online users in other regions. This will determine how you approach your content and what language you use to attract new people to the page.
2. Be Consistently Active
Social media is about staying active and being consistently present. Of course, you don’t need to post content daily to be successful online, but staying engaged as much as possible is essential.
You don’t want to post too often, though. Pages that post too often can be marked as spam and won’t be promoted. Plan to post at least once a week and up to daily. Then, further your interaction by commenting and talking to followers.
If you don’t have much time to dedicate to your social media page, you can ask a close friend or relative to help. You can also post a job advertisement in your local town to see if any young person would be interested in working as a social media manager for your homestead.
That way, you can delegate the tasks and spend more time on your homestead without sacrificing your advertising goals. Alternatively, you can spend a few days a month creating posts and uploading them on a schedule.
For instance, on Instagram, you can save drafts for later. This allows you to stay on top of your content plan and keep engaged even during busy times of the year.
3. Use Eye-Catching Photos and Videos
One of the best ways to get people interested in your homestead is to take gorgeous photos and videos of your land, products, gardens, and animals. You can take images of baby animals, newly blossomed flowers, fresh vegetables, or landscape shots of the farm.
Depending on your goals and the platform you’re using, you can also post photos of you and your family on social media. Uses tend to feel more connected and interested in you and your homestead if they can see your face and get to know you as a person.
Make the images relevant to the time of year. Take seasonal photos during the summer when your produce is fresh, and the sun is shining. Or snap holiday photos when snow is on the ground.
If you don’t feel confident taking photos of your homestead, you can hire a professional photographer to capture your homestead and family. You can also use free stock images now and then.
The last thing you want is poor-quality photos to represent your homestead on social media. Hiring a professional photographer can help you establish the main brand images that you can use on your homepage, avatar, and video intros.
Plus, you can make extra copies and hang them around your home too!
Having said that, if you’re using video content, many people relate to videos that look more amateur and less polished. It helps people feel connected. Many social media users are tired of the fake, curated stuff that doesn’t reflect real life.
Speaking of…
4. Engage Authentically With Users
Marketing your homestead online is no different than talking with a neighbor about your farm; you need to be friendly and engaged. Just because you’re communicating through a screen doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put the same effort into your interactions.
You can interact with your followers by replying to messages, liking comments, and using polls to get their feedback on your homestead or farm. Another way to engage with your community is to host live videos where people can see you walk around the space.
Don’t feel like you need to maintain a professional face. It’s ok to let people know when you have problems or struggles. We all do! Your followers will appreciate the honesty.
Just remember to respond actively to questions and acknowledge client requests promptly. After all, you don’t want customers to feel underappreciated or neglected, so you should also treat your social media professionally.
Don’t ignore messages for weeks or suddenly stop posting about your products. That way, you’ll build trust with your community. They know you’ll be around.
On that note, you should also avoid getting into politics unless your brand is specifically political. A gentle nudge for your favorite candidate or cause is fine, but avoid anything that could be too controversial. This is a business, after all.
5. Make the Content Fun
Posting content on your social media page for your homestead shouldn’t feel like a burden; you should have fun creating fun posts and taking photos for your brand. To make things a little more exciting, you can schedule events at the homestead and make content from it.
You can host monthly potluck dinners with your local community, markets during the festive season, or special birthday events for your friends and family. These are all great opportunities to take snapshots of your farm full of people and decorated.
This shows the fun side of your business, and it draws in more people both in person and on social media. It’s a win-win.
6. Collaborate
There are lots of small business owners out there struggling to find clients. Help each other out by collaborating. You could cross-post to promote each other or trade advertisements with your followers.
Or maybe you want to advertise some of your favorite products that you use of a fellow crafter. They might just pay back the favor.
7. Remember That You’re a Business
The goal of social media is to promote your business, not gain a bunch of followers. You want people who are buying your products not just liking your posts. The point of all the videos and photos is to entice buyers, not make people envy your wonderful life.
Be clear on how people can purchase from you. Make it easy and simple. Ads should be a side hustle, not your main focus.
Respond to inquiries right away, update your online inventory promptly, and support your customers and potential customers.
At the same time, remember that this isn’t your personal platform. Keep business and personal separate, be professional, and stay positive.
8. Know How to Use Your Platform
Every platform is different, but generally, you’ll want to make use of tagging (when you link to someone else on the platform, usually using the @ symbol) and hashtags (descriptive words that explain what your post is about, usually using the # symbol).
You also want to use stories, live feeds, posts, reels, and any other various posting options that the platform offers. You don’t want to only post photos once a week, for instance, or you run the risk of reaching far fewer people.
By mixing it up you create engagement and interest.
Which Social Media Platform Is Best?
When picking the right social media platform for your homestead, you must consider a few things before setting up your account. You can use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest. Choose YouTube or TikTok if you want to focus on video content.
As many people want to promote their homestead via photos, Instagram and Facebook are great for uploading pictures and writing captions that provide more details on buying products or explaining what’s going on in your neck of the woods.
In comparison, Twitter is great for conversing with users, which gives you a feeling that you can keep in touch with your community throughout the day.
No matter what you choose, you want to ensure that your social media reflects your brand and personality. And you can always use multiple platforms to connect with different groups of people. Just find what works best for you.
