Integration of Available Social Media to Reach a Broader Market in Turfgrass Extension.

The movement towards the exchange of extension-based information continues to shift towards more web-based markets.  Faster internet speeds, access to information on mobile devices, and the boom of social media has created an environment in which many practitioners expect an increased number of brief updates in a timely fashion.  Unfortunately, there continues to be no standard social media tool used by each individual.  Depending on preference of the individual end user, information may be received by e-mail, Facebook, blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, and various other electronic formats.  Unfortunately, content developers generally do not have the time to transmit this information to each of the various formats.  To produce timely updates and reach as large an audience as possible, content developers must learn to integrate the various social media tools.  In 2009, an informational blog (www.turfdiseases.blogspot.com) was developed using the free blog website Blogger.  The purpose of the site is to provide timely regional updates for golf course superintendents throughout the United States.  To make the information available in a broad range of formats, the blog content was integrated with Feedburner, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, and others.  The integration utilizes free applications to feed the various sites automatically once a new post has been submitted to the main Blogger webpage. Since analytics tracking began in 2010, only 23.8% of the site’s visits were the result of direct traffic. The remaining traffic was driven by referring sites (32.4%), search engines (29.8%), and other sources (14.08%). Between 1 January and 2 August 2010, a total of 25,735 visits from 105 countries/territories have been recorded.  While only 87 and 307 “followers” were documented via Blogger and Twitter, respectively, a total of 883 “Likes” were recorded on the site’s Facebook page.  Based on the results to date, it appears important to distribute web content to multiple social networking sites in order to reach as broad an audience as possible.  Allowing the end-user to choose their preferred method of content delivery will likely result in a more loyal readership and greater audience reach.