Exploration of Nebraska Agricultural Educators’ use of Social Media to Promote their Local FFA Chapters

Strong stakeholder relations are particularly important for FFA, and research has demonstrated the utility of social media for enhancing these relations for the National FFA and state FFA programs. However, not much information is available for how local FFA chapters utilize social media to communicate with stakeholders. Therefore, this study sought to explore agricultural educators’ experiences with social media. An online survey was distributed to a census of agricultural educators through the Nebraska AGED listserv (N = 269), and there were 73 (n = 73) complete and useable responses. Respondents most frequently used Facebook to post about their FFA program and identified Facebook as the most effective platform for stakeholder communication. Additionally, respondents possessed positive perceptions of the benefits associated with using social media but did identify barriers, including how much time social media can take to promote their chapters. While the respondents in the study did use social media and identified it as an effective tool for communicating with community members, there are opportunities to further improve the use of social media to ensure messages reach and resonate with the intended audience. Teacher educator programs should partner with agricultural communicators to develop professional development programming and resources to assist teachers with using social media to promote their programs. Additionally, this research should be replicated in other states to provide a holistic understanding of agricultural educator’s experiences with social media.