10 Tips for Growing Your Professional Network on AgFuse

AgFuse is a free social and informational networking platform designed exclusively for farmers and other agricultural professionals including suppliers, agronomists, researchers, insurance specialists, policymakers, journalists, and influencers. Here you’ll be able to connect with industry experts near and far while sharing stories, promoting useful products, learning new strategies, making friends, and forming valuable business associations.

To help you get started, here are ten tips for expanding your professional network and connecting with other ag professionals on our AgFuse platform.

1. Visit the Follow Suggestions Page

The Follow Suggestions page is divided up into two tabs: Individuals and Groups. Suggestions on these tabs are algorithmically sorted to show you members and groups that best match your location and interests.

Simply tap the Follow button next to a member or group of interest. Depending on their privacy settings, they’ll either receive notice that you started following them or notice of your follow request. Once approved, you’ll see their latest posts and other content delivered straight to your feed.

2. Update Your Profile

Because follow suggestions are based on geography and mutual interests, you can improve your suggestions--and optimize your presence within others’ suggestions--by keeping your profile up to date regarding location, job titles, and interests.

To check on your profile selections, simply visit your profile page and click “Edit Profile.” You can take a moment to look through the Your Interests section and check all of the categories relevant to your operation, position, or preferences.

3. Create Posts

To optimize your experience using AgFuse, we’ve implemented a number of features related to posting content. Here’s a quick look at the basic functionalities, which can help you connect with other agricultural professionals in a manner that’s convenient, straightforward, and productive.

• Insert Hyperlinks. To share a link, you can click “Link” within the Quick Post section in order to see fields specifically designed for sharing a link. Alternatively, you can also paste links in the general "What’s going on?” Quick Post field, which supports such content.
  
  
• Upload Photos. To share a photo, click “Add Photo” within the Quick Post panel and select up to four images to add in a single post.
  
  
• Embed Tweets or YouTube Videos. To repost a Tweet or YouTube video, paste the content’s direct URL into the “What’s going on?” field.
  
  
• Include @Mentions. To mention another AgFuse member when making a Quick Post, type the “@” symbol and, without entering a space, immediately begin typing the name of the member you want to mention, which will prompt the appearance of a drop-down list of members. Select the name of the individual you want to mention and your plain text will be converted into a hyperlinked tag.

4. Publish Articles and Infographics

To further expand your reach, you can use our free AgFuse Publishing tool to publish your own long-form content. To get started, click “Publish Article” in the menu bar on our website. Every week, the AgFuse team reviews the published content and shares popular picks plus an editor's favorite in our weekly newsletter the AgFuse Digest.

On AgFuse, you can also publish infographics. To do so, visit the Quick Post panel and click “Infographic.” You'll be able to upload your infographic file and add a related description. You can even populate advanced fields, if desired, to set a meta description and some SEO keywords to further optimize your reach.

5. Use AgAnswers to Ask and Answer Questions

AgAnswers is a helpful Q&A tool that allows you to ask questions and receive answers from the community. Whether you have questions about cover crops, manure sampling, planter maintenance, or so on, you can use AgAnswers to publish a question and can then use the Request Expert Answer feature to request an answer from top experts in related fields.

To get started, simply click “Question” within the Quick Post panel. When members you follow ask questions, you’ll naturally see the questions in your feed and can click “Answer” in order to share your own expert thoughts.

6. Select Relevant Categories When Publishing Content

When creating posts, articles, infographics, and questions, there is a Select a Category field that you can use to help categorize your content. You can either begin typing a word to see related matches or you can scroll down the drop-down list to see options such as Peanuts, Dairy, Irrigation, Marketing, Orchard Crops, and so on.

When you add relevant categories to your content, then such content will appear on the related Category pages on AgFuse so others interested in the topic can easily see your content and know they want to start following you. For example, check out the Category page for Operating a Farm. 

7. Create A Group

Whether you want to publicly promote a business, privately associate with a certain set of colleagues, regionally discuss specific issues, or otherwise connect with a particular demographic within the AgFuse community, creating a free AgFuse group can help you seamlessly reach your target audience. To get started, click “Create a Group” in the main menu. 

• Use AgFuse as your group. Once your group is set up, group administrators can enable a Use AgFuse As mode so that specific posts are made on behalf of the group rather than an individual member. To access the mode, click on your name in the top-right corner of the menu bar, which will prompt drop-down options to appear.
  
  
• Invite members to follow your group. After enabling the Use AgFuse As mode, you have the capability of inviting specific AgFuse members to follow your group by clicking the green “Invite” button featured alongside a member’s name on profile pages, in search results, and in Network panels.
  
  
• Add group contributors. If you want help managing your AgFuse group, you can add other community members as group contributors so they can assist with tasks such as editing the group’s basic settings, making posts on behalf of the group and inviting others to follow the group. To add a contributor, visit your group page, click “Edit Group” and then click “Advanced Group Settings.”

8. Use the Share Feature to Promote Your AgFuse Content on Your Other Social Media Accounts

Immediately after posting content, you’ll see a Share pop-up menu. Alternatively, you can always access the Share button that's under published content. Using this feature to share your AgFuse content on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn can help more people see your AgFuse content and profile.

Parenthetically, if you’re not already connected with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, we’d love for that to change! We use these external platforms to share interesting links and valuable tips while also spreading the word about what AgFuse community members are up to. If you’d like us to share your posts, be sure to tag us or send a private message so we can follow you and help publicize your projects and accomplishments.

9. Engage with Others’ Content on AgFuse

A natural way to grow your reach on AgFuse is to fully participate in the community here. Upvote, comment on, and repost other members’ content. As you reach out, our warm and friendly community is bound to reciprocate.

Another perk of being active within the community is being featured on our Leaderboard, which highlights community members who publish and engage with relevant content including posts, articles, and comments.

In addition to having an Overall Leaderboard, we’ve also created subsections to recognize contributors who focus on specific categories such as Corn, Cover Crops, or Precision Ag. You can access all of these categories on our main Leaderboard landing page. You can also see various Leaderboard-related panels throughout the platform including on the homepage, profile pages, and Category pages.

10. Invite Your Friends to Join AgFuse

To invite your friends to become part of the AgFuse community, you can visit your homepage, locate the panel Invite Your Friends to Join AgFuse, and click the button “Send an Invite.” The pop-up form can be used to send emails, publish Tweets and Facebook posts, and copy a referral URL to share on other platforms.

You can also invite others to join a specific group on AgFuse by visiting that group’s profile page and then clicking “Share Group.” If the recipient of your invitation is not already a member of AgFuse, they’ll be guided through the process of signing up on AgFuse and then joining the specific group.