Do you have a social media profile set up for your business? If not, it’s not a bad idea!
Social media is an excellent way to advertise your business, without the splurge on marketing resources. All you need is your phone and access to the social media applications of your choice.
While social media is an excellent way to capture your seedstock or commercial business on farm, there are a few things to remember when utilising your social media as a marketing resource.
If you are establishing a social media page with the intention of utilising it to help advertise your cattle and give your potential buyers a look into your life on-farm, you need to keep in mind that while you want to capture the heart of your business, you have to remember the importance of keeping a professional image to your brand.
A business social media page is a representation of your enterprise. While you can use your social media to express yourself and have a bit of fun, don’t forget that your audience is vast, so you don’t want to share anything that doesn’t represent your brand or business well.
While many of us don’t really have a professional camera handy, in this day and age some pretty great photography can be captured with a smart phone.
But this doesn’t mean just any old iPhone photo should be used on your business Instagram or Facebook. If you are photographing or videoing your cattle, you have to ask yourself, ‘Does that photo best represent my herd?’
By comparison, if it were to go into the newspaper, would you be happy with the photo? If its blurry, for example, and doesn’t show what you are trying to communicate well, does it need to go up?
Being slightly picky about what you post can be an excellent way of curating your feed to not only capture the essence and intrigue of your business but can also work to better represent your top-quality herd when it comes to sale time.
There are plenty of tips for some great cattle photography that you can capture on your smartphone:
- Timing in the day: While some moments are understandably “you’ve got to be there” situations that have to be captured then and there (e.g. a funny moment, or equally a pretty cute one), when it comes to capturing general photos of your herd, there are some golden hour times that you should try and hit to get a great image. Ideally the couple of hours after sunrise and the couple of hours before sunset are best, with the sun behind you. You want to avoid the sun being directly above you.
- If you’ve zoomed in quite a lot to capture a photo at a distance, unfortunately this can compromise the quality of the image. Adding to this if the lighting isn’t great, then your beautiful Angus animals can just look like little black marks. If possible, try to avoid maximum zoom in from a distance, because more often than not, the audience isn’t seeing the excellent view that you are.
- Practice makes perfect! Obviously, while these are just tips to give you a hand, just capturing some great moments on farm is an excellent start to your social media marketing and practice makes perfect. Keep going, keeping in mind these tips, and good luck!
Credit: Angus Australia