CCGA and Social Media

Social media describes what we post on websites and apps like Facebook (FB). Think of regular media as a “one way street” where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report, without the ability to give your thoughts on the matter. It gives CCGA a two-way “street” that enables your ability to communicate and engage with us through sharing photos, linking to articles, listing events, and even just consuming information. CCGA has been on FB since November of 2013 when most of our posts were shared links to other pages or posts of meetings and reminders.

If you’d like a look back, here’s a link to a short video, 1st Cut – Connecting Chicago Community Gardeners – http://youtu.be/FThKH6AnP6k.

Photo sharing caught on; by May of 2015 CCGA was creating albums of photos and an active timeline. Today we continue to post your stories, your photos, your events, and we know you are still following and liking CCGA.

If there’s one thing the FB is good at, it is keeping data to tell us just how well we’re engaging with our followers. These statistics give us another way of looking at CCGA. Wow, 70% of our followers are women, 27% are men. By far the widest engagement we have with our community of gardeners is when there is a distribution. Only 15 gardeners may register in advance for the sale or distribution, but our engagement will spike up to 539 views, and that includes folks who share our post with others. That gives us a better picture of how many gardeners may show up “the day of”. This “whale image” shows that our followers are actively engaged all day; it would not be unusual to find that we are not insomniacs and night owls, but the image is just fun, don’t you think?