Social Media in Action Part One: How a Farm Cultivated Dedicated Fans via Facebook

If you live in northern Virginia and have kids, you have either heard of or been to Great Country Farms (GCF).  It is a 200 acre working farm owned by the Zurschmeide family nestled at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in small, historic, rural, and beautiful Bluemont, VA.  GCF is just part of the thriving tourism industry in Loudoun County, VA that is heavily promoted in and around the metro Washington, DC area and the Mid-Atlantic region.  The undeveloped and scenic western part of the county is bursting with charming bed and breakfasts, numerous award-winning wineries, quaint, Revolutionary War-era towns and villages, and gracious, historic manor homes.

The Zurschmeides have done a great deal of work to promote their farm.  Without even looking at their website, I can tell you that GCF offers us city-folk a chance to experience farming in a fun, innovative way.  I can join their CSA (community supported agriculture) and receive farm shares from May through October, hold a wedding, corporate retreat, or birthday party at their facilities, or visit their farm and pick produce, let my kids climb and play on old tractor and farming equipment, go on a hayride, buy their produce and other delectable homemade goods at their farm market/store, pet and feed animals and sample wine at Bluemont Vineyard, which is directly across the street from GCF (and which the Zurschmeides co-own, too).

Now, farms aren’t normally associated with social media, but GCF have embraced it.  Because the Zurschmeides are so busy running a farm and managing special events, they were smart enough to quickly realize that they couldn’t keep up with social media and PR, too.  Last summer they hired someone to do it for them.  Christine Geno, President of Geno Communications (website under construction) and a Loudoun County-based PR, social media, and event planning expert in the hospitality and travel and tourism industry, stepped in and delivered incredible inbound marketing results with Facebook.

When Chris took over GCF’s Facebook page last summer, they had around 350 fans.  In 8 ½ months, their fanbase grew by 580%.  When you realize that GCF is basically closed for 4 ½ months (from mid-November to the end of March), those stats are even more impressive.  Chris told me that a couple of weeks ago, they gained 139 fans in one week.  Here’s what Chris does to cultivate such rapid Facebook fan growth:

• Cross-promote GCF. Chris posts whatever she posts on GCF’s Facebook page to her page (she is very well connected), community and mom pages (of which they are apparently a lot), and a few really popular local pages, like the Northern Virginia Real Estate Times (who knew?).
• Encourage dialogue. People are eager to share, and Chris encourages it.  She asks people what their favorite feature of the farm is or if they have photos of a recent visit to share.  And they do!  They post photos, videos, questions, comments, and what they did while at GCF.
• Build a community. When people ask questions, other fans are eager to jump in and answer.  Chris will also do quite a bit of behind-the-scenes research to answer questions, too.  As a result, GCF is becoming an important player in the sustainable, organic, and all-natural food movement.
• Link to other social media networks. Chris has GCF’s Facebook page linked to GCF’s Twitter account, and she has her personal LinkedIn and Twitter account linked to her personal Facebook profile, so GCF posts get automatically reposted to 2 other networks, too, increasing each post’s reach.  (Chris uses HootSuite to manage all of these accounts.) Other FB users and Twitter followers then repost or retweet, which broadens the outreach even more. The FB posts also help with GCF’s ranking on Google.
• Links to media: Chris’s Facebook posts are followed by a wide range of local, regional, national, and international print and online travel and news media, thus enabling her to reach them with news of events and updates from GCF.
• Promote Facebook constantly. “Become a fan” is prominently featured on all press releases Chris sends out, and the FB and Twitter buttons are right on the GCF website’s home page.

GCF’s numerous promotional efforts don’t begin and end with Facebook, though.  In my next post, I’ll share their other highly successful marketing efforts.

All photos courtesy of Great Country Farms.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Branding, Marketing, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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