Infographic

See here an infographic based on data sourced from Twitter using Netlytic.org. For more information on this data, check out my post on scope.

Scope of the Study

Data was gathered from 2000 tweets by 1032 unique posters as of December 8th, 2018 at 4:14pm. This is what was used to create the infographic and to give a basis for the analysis throughout the rest of the project. It has to be acknowledged that data of this genre is constantly being updated with more and more user-generated content, but the general scope of the study can be assumed to be representative of a few trends.

The data collected included keywords, unique users (who may have varying degrees of engagement) and categories of subject matter based on the aforementioned keywords.

The main trends observed are as follows:

• Larger organizations have more consistent engagement and organic reach. They dominate the popular agriculture-related hashtags (#ontag, #harvest18 - or presumably any harvest year, #cdnag), seem to be the reigning authority as they retweet farmer and agri-business accounts, and serve as a news source for farming science and updates. They also have the time and resources (a communications team, presumably) to produce original content that appeals to users for retweeting.

• Keywords are mainly positive or neutral. While there are words like 'Canadian' and 'field' come up in a lot of tweets, so do 'great,' 'happy,' and 'dedicated.'

• Engagement within these hashtags and with these keywords declines in what appears to be the off-season. When the farmers aren't producing/harvesting crops, they're less likely to engage online about those topics. They have less original content such as images and videos of crops and/or machinery. They don't rely on consistent updates about crop science, disease and weather conditions.

Who Are These Users?

Twitter appeals to a variety of subcategories of people within the agriculture field. It serves the purpose of informing and connecting people who had originally relied on seemingly archaic forms of communicating. Many farmers know each other personally – they know each other’s wives, sons and daughters, and the roles each of these relations fill on the farm or in the office respectively. The family dynamic of farming is evident also online, where people will boast their familial titles in their Twitter bios. This seems to be most prevalent amongst farmers but can also be found in the bios of agri-business professionals. The family dynamic has thus been imposed on to the digital sphere in a bizarre hybrid of communication between hundreds of people framed as a conversation between neighbors. The hashtag #OntAg accounts for over a thousand unique users, but conversation threads include a variety of inside jokes and user-specific commentary.

There’s a second (word) in the realm of Ontarian agricultural Twitter. Agri-business representatives, agriculture students and agriculture scientists use the medium not only to discuss new methods of crop management but also to discuss agricultural policy. They can discuss larger global and international issues that impact the farming community in Ontario. NATO, for example, spurred a massive conversation online.