Farm Forestry New ZealandFarm forestry and social media
Michael Gravatt, New Zealand Tree Grower February 2020.
Male, pale and stale is not a bad way to describe the current state of the NZFFA. To say that farm forestry has been behind the eight ball on finding new ways to increase membership is an understatement. Despite our best intentions – big hefty manuals of information, paid membership and talking about trees among trees are foreign concepts to many of the younger generation.
We know trees, and the younger generation have the enthusiasm to plant them, so how do we connect the two worlds? We have taken farm forestry to social media, a place that most of the younger generation and New Zealanders in general visit daily.
What is social media?
Social media is a strange world to many of us so let us start simply. In general, social media is a place on the internet where people gather and talk. It is not as scary as we think, it is just a place where a lot of people look every day and see information from a lot of places all at once – so let us be one of them. Since the national conference we have focused on Facebook and YouTube to see if we can get the attention of young people in New Zealand with the essence of our association. The simple answer is we can.
Currently, 2.3 million New Zealanders use Facebook every day, and we have created a Facebook page to appeal to at least some of these people. Youtube on the other hand is the new home for our videos, a website which has over 1.9 billion users globally. We do not need to reach all those people but connecting with some of them will put the NZFFA in a much better place.
What we now post on social media
Social media is fundamentally different from our other forms of communication. The idea is that the people who are reading what we post are not already interested in trees and it is our job to get them involved. In general, we post short, engaging items with links to more information if people want it. We also post upcoming field days from the regional branches and interesting tree-related news items.
We have had success posting what we call ‘Tree of the Week’. It highlights a tree that we grow in New Zealand, where it grows well, what its end uses are and other information such as silviculture regimes, but all in less than 200 words. A couple of nice pictures also go a long way.
What have we achieved by doing this? We currently have over 1,700 people who like our Facebook page. That means those people are interested in our association and will notice when we post more content.
To put that in perspective. Forest Call is the Facebook page for the NZ Forest Owners Association. We currently have 380 per cent more likes than they have, but on just 1.6 per cent of their budget. Our posts are currently reaching approximately 13,000 people a month, and over 3,000 of those are interacting with our posts.
By making trees fun again in a new medium with which most of our members are not familiar we are interacting with a new generation of people. It would be easy to write off these people as not genuine because we found them on the internet. However, from the brand we are creating and the directed placement of our advertisements, we can be sure that most of those people are New Zealanders − 97 per cent in fact. In addition, 75 per cent of these are younger than 45 years of age.
How to get involved
How can you see what we are up to in this space? To see our Facebook page you do not need to sign up to Facebook. Just type www.facebook.com/ NZFarmForestry into your web browser. If you do have access to Facebook feel free to show that you like the page. It is just another way that we are communicating with the world.
To watch any of our videos, they are now live on YouTube. You can find them by going to YouTube and searching for New Zealand Farm Forestry Association you will recognise the logo. We have all our member profiles up there and a bunch of how-to videos created by the various action groups about some of the alternative species.
Michael is a 26-year-old researcher at the University of Auckland. He has been a member of the NZFFA since 2013 and runs the NZFFA social media.
NZFFA on facebook