Facebook Activity of Oklahoma Agritourism Operations

Abstract

Agritourism is an expanding industry in rural areas. Agritourism operators seek to efficiently market their operations and reach consumers far removed from agriculture. Social media serves a crucial role in tourism marketing; however, limited research exists on agritourism marketing to advise agritourism operators or those who advise agritourism operators. A quantitative content analysis was performed on 174 Oklahoman agritourism operation Facebook pages to describe posts, events, and business information created during the month of June 2018.

Pages with at least one original post had more page likes than pages without. Amongst farm types, hunting agritourism operations had the lowest proportion of pages with at least one original post, while farm-to-table agritourism operations had the highest proportion. Number of reviews had a very strong relationship to total page likes, while other factors such as number of community and event posts had only a moderate relationship to page likes. Events were not frequent on Oklahoma agritourism Facebook pages, and overall page activity did not have a relationship with the number of people interested in going to events. Amongst original posts, posts created by the agritourism operator were most frequent, followed by posts shared from other sources. Pages with at least one live video or post about an event were most active. Hashtags were infrequently observed amongst Facebook posts, with limited consistency within individual pages or across multiple pages. Pages with an advertisement had more page likes than pages without advertisements.

Recommendations to agritourism operators include encouraging agritourism visitors to create Facebook content, utilizing Facebook advertisements, and creating at least one original post. Additionally, agritourism operators should create a variety of types of original posts and utilize advertisements. Perhaps most important, agritourism operations should be wary of emphasizing quantity over quality in Facebook marketing. Future research should qualitatively describe Facebook pages and interview agritourism operators and visitors. Additionally, comparing Facebook data to "real life" data, such as business revenue/expense and number of visitors, could further measure the effective of various Facebook marketing practices.