Abstract

Veterinarians play a vital role in rural sector by not only treating and curing the diseases, but by acting as opinion leaders for livestock farming community. To enable the livestock farmers for adopting the latest technology, veterinarians need to have proper dissemination tools like latest social media. Two to three (2-3) veterinarians were chosen randomly from each district of Gujarat state thus constituting a sample size of seventy (70). Usefulness of latest social media was measured under three categories i.e. communication aspect, usefulness aspect and knowledge aspect. Major findings of the study were more than two fifth (44.29 per cent) of the respondents belonged to middle age group and three fifth (60.00 per cent) of them were veterinary science graduates, while more than one third (37.15 per cent) of them had high to very high level of experience in the veterinary field. Slightly less than half (48.56 per cent) veterinarians belonged to government and more than two fifth (44.28 per cent) of them had medium annual income between rupees five to ten (5,00,001 to 10,00,000) lakh. Most of the respondents were using the WhatsApp, Google+ and Facebook daily. Frequency of using YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn were observed less, as most of them were not using these for professional use. The main usefulness of latest social media as felt by respondents was a more users friendly (1st rank). It was also felt that latest social media is useful to take help for emergency cases (2nd rank), latest social media makes communication speedy and easy (3rd rank) and virtual groups on latest social media are one of the standard sources for information (4th group).

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