A Content Analysis of the 2016 National Teach Ag Day's Facebook Posts

Abstract

A serious issue facing the agricultural education profession is a lack of qualified teachers. The profession recognizes there is a need to recruit new teachers and retain existing teachers. With these goals in mind, the National Teach Ag Campaign was established as an effort to encourage students to pursue a career in agricultural education and to support existing instructors. Each year, the campaign celebrates National Teach Ag Day to highlight this campaign and encourage others to help reach the initiative’s goals. The purpose of this study is to explore how the National Teach Ag organization used Facebook for its annual “Teach Ag Day” campaign. Guided by the conceptual framework of communicative functions, a census of all posts on the National Teach Ag Facebook page for a three-week period was selected for this quantitative content analysis to evaluate general Facebook page attributes, post characteristics, engagement indicators, and communicative functions. The majority of posts contained text, graphics, hashtags, and links. Community Building was the most prevalent communicative function. The campaign demonstrated many best practices to engage audiences on Facebook, but future efforts should incorporate more videos and respond to comments. Future research should explore the reach and sentiment of shared Teach Ag Day posts.