| Tuula Loytty
We share the news of new applications, solutions and implementations both in SmartAfriHub platform and in three main social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and WhatsApp. They together form a SmartAfriHub communication tools that reaches out the farmers, smart agriculture experts and versatile stakeholders. The community is constantly growing. Let's look into the current status and activity of the SmartAfriHub social media channels.
We have just reached magical limit of 400 members in Facebook. The FB-group is public and we thus invite and encourage new members to join in the community and to publish and share Smart Agriculture papers and posts at the group. This is a practical way to reach out quite a nice bunch (over 400) of fellows, right.
The SmartAfriHub Twitter account provides a tool to tweet and share brief posts. It complements nicely the other communication modes. The number of Twitter followers could be higher and as known it will require presence, activity and good content.
The roots of the Linkedin group lead to the year 2010. At that time the project called FOODIE4Africa was active and LI group was established under the wings of the project. It was the starting point for a long journey that is still going on. Nowadays the LI-group name is FOODIE4Africa - SmartAfriHub. The aim of the group is to encourage innovation and ICT (information and communications technologies) in Africa. The intention of the LI-group is to develop a social space for African agriculture where farmers, the industry, research community, advisory services and others will be able share their knowledge, needs and experience.
In Africa WhatsApp is widely used and in order to facilitate interactive communication it was necessary to establish the SmartAfriHub WA- group in early phase. Because of the COVID-19 many people of our target group were, and still are, in lockdown and hence their possibilities to reach out social media are limited. WA by mobile phone is a low-threshold service and it provides an efficient channel for dialogue. SmartAfriHub community will continue and develop further the usage of WA.
Today, SmartAfriHub channels have nearly 800 users, followers and content creators. We warmly welcome all new stakeholders, followers and value creators to advance smart agriculture movement in Africa, and to share and amplify our message.