A Comparative Study on Social Media Utilization Pattern by Farmers of Different Age Groups

The study was conducted in Hisar and Sonipat districts of Haryana, with an objective to understand the Social media utilization pattern and age wise comparison of social media use of the farmers. The data was personally collected from 200 respondents comprising 25 farmers from eight villages through a well-structured interview schedule and the collected data was analyzed using suitable statistical tools. Findings revealed that YouTube was the most used social media followed by WhatsApp and Facebook with majority of farmers making their regular use while Twitter was the least used social media with only a small proportion of farmers making its use. Around three-fourth of farmers were spending less than two hours on social media while a miniscule 03.00 percent farmers were spending more than 4 hours on browsing social media. In terms of utilization pattern of social media, most of the farmers were found using Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube for agricultural information, News, connecting & chatting and entertainment whereas the use of Twitter, Telegram and Instagram were very limited. Comparison of social media utilization pattern using independent sample t-test for three age groups of farmers i.e., young, middle and old, revealed that there was significant difference in utilization pattern of different social media among the young, middle and old farmers except for WhatsApp which did not show any considerable difference in its utilization.