Sep 4, 2024

Fresh Views: Alstede Farms leverages social media platforms, emails to assist with its success

Alstede Farms, is a majority-female owned family farm that is now entering its second generation with myself and my sister as owners. Our business grows more than 800 acres of fruits and vegetables, and social media is critical to sharing our message regarding events, products and our farm family story.

Overall, we have four farm stores operating year- round and 18 weekly farmers markets all selling our fresh produce. We offer a 1,000 member Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share subscription program in addition to a large pick-your-own operation in northern New Jersey. Because of our proximity to New York City, we are reaching a clientele far outside of our direct community.

Using social media for promotional purposes

Social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram, “X”, Tiktok and Snapchat have completely changed the way we market our business, products and our farming family. Whether promoting special events, festivals, feature items or alerting customers of closures, social media is a critical resource to our farm.

We find the benefit of utilizing social media is easily measured, but comes with many hours of managing accounts, reviews and content creation on a daily basis. Our marketing team is on high alert — looking for new ways to market our business so we stand out from all the other businesses on social media sites. Staying relevant with all ages on all platforms is a challenge that we as a business are facing everyday.

Social media platforms, in addition to our own network of email customers, have been critical to the success of our marketing team but they do not come without their unique challenges.

That being said, no matter how much we try to target certain demographics on social media, we are constantly at the mercy of the algorithm.

As a business, we are limited to the music that we can use for content, which hinders our visibility and restricts our content being pushed to our viewers. While social media is very helpful and critical to our business, we also understand the value of creating a customer base outside of social media.

Event promotion and creating your customer base 

Promoting events is one of the main uses of our social media platforms. We have an extensive calendar of events happening each year and start planning our content far in advance. Our marketing manager determines when each “event season” begins and the content follows the schedule until the completion of the event.

For our fall events, we typically start promoting in August with fall color-schemed posts that point viewers to the fall content. We find that having colors/ branding that is consistent for events helps distinguish posts for our users.

We differentiate the look for promotion of fall events from promotion of homegrown produce items. Our fall posts glow with reds and oranges, while farm store promotions shine in blue and green. This color strategy helps viewers instantly connect with our content and get excited about what’s new. When promoting events, especially in the fall, it is important to create content that is understandable and directs people to our website.

A limited amount of tickets are sold for our fall events and accessing them on the website is the only way to know if they are sold out or not. We want each viewer of our social media page to convert to being email list subscribers.

Our content is simplified with a goal of directing our customers to the website for ticket sales. We limit use of our email list for promotion of events to minimize the risk of people unsubscribing and leaving your network.

We offer a mix of content in our emails to feature signature items for sale, promoting events, sharing important information, and educational content about what is going on on the farm.

People respond well when the emails are worth reading. Because of this, we always try adding in a recipe or relating our video content with the holiday coming up. This lets people know that we are not just searching for a sale every time we email them.

We have noticed that a post of a simple photo is not enough these days and for people to truly interact with our content and have it result in website clicks or email list subscriptions — we need to curate content. People engage most with informational videos or with graphics.

Gone are the days when people utilize the caption to get their attention. If the information being shared is not on the image itself, people will not likely get the message. This has resulted in an increase of funds toward graphic design for open and closed alerts, fall or spring activity posts and many others.

Our content is based on real events happening on our real farm with the motive to connect our customers to their local farmer. In addition to promoting our farm, family and products, we also utilize social media to connect on a more personal level with our 800 CSA members on their own private facebook group. We find the members enjoy having a place to connect to the farmers and share recipes, see updates on the crops in the fields, and to share general concerns — knowing there will be an answer.

Written by Rebekah Alstede Modery

Rebekah Alstede Modery is a second-generation farmer and co-owner of Alstede Farms, a woman-owned farm in Chester, New Jersey. She is highly knowledgeable in running the business, meeting the requirements for sustainable farming and team management, thanks to her dual degrees in Agricultural Business and Sustainable Agriculture from Delaware Valley University.

Alstede is part of a production team responsible for ensuring that produce from over 800 acres of farmland is safe and promptly delivered to its four market locations throughout New Jersey. Alstede Farms direct markets 100% of the products it grows and also operates an expansive pick-your-own operation and a CSA program with over 1,000 members.