By Jarai Carter, 2020

Social media continues to grow in importance for people to communicate and search for information. Facebook is the most popular social media network in the world with over 2.7 billion monthly active users (Statista.com). Facebook and other platforms are also being used now more than ever in the agriculture industry. Social media has expanded access to information sources and farming communities can find solutions faster. By studying this use, we can better describe online farming communities, leading to targeted approaches of agricultural information dissemination.

This research focused on discovering associations between demographics and social media use by farmers and other agriculture professionals in Illinois. A survey was sent out to Illinois Farm Bureau and Extension members which included questions about demographics and social media use. A few demographic items analyzed include gender, age, and length of time in agriculture. A few social media use items analyzed include skill level, platform use, and content types.

Results will present associations from Chi-square tests between demographics and social media use, the strengths of the associations, and one-way ANOVAs to demonstrate group differences. Do different genders use different social media platforms? Do different age groups rate themselves differently in social media skill level? How helpful are certain content types on Facebook? These are just a few sample analyses. The hope is to provide those in communication and policy fields information about how to best target their agriculture audiences.

The coding language R was used for analysis. Data used was part of dissertation work on Facebook use in Illinois by farming communities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The dissertation can be found at this link here.

This file has the version of R that I was running with all the associated packages and their versions listed.

Here are some great resources that I used for select packages:

• tidytext
• ggplot2