This initiative is a partnership between the Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Midwest Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports, DJ Case and Associates, Southwick Associates, and participating states. How do new and beginner hunters use social media in their hunting journeys? Does usage among novice hunters vary by platform? Should state wildlife agency recruitment, retention, and reactivation specialists seek out and engage with novice hunters on social media platforms, and if so, how? How can states and partners engage with specific hunter segments to maximize our return on investment? Without answers, the Recruitment, Retention, and Reactivation Community can only guess how to market to potential new hunters, and the impacts of these platforms on hunter recruitment and retention are not well known. This project seeks to comprehensively understand how novice hunters utilize social media for learning and social support, providing crucial insights for enhancing recruitment and retention efforts. Novice hunters’ social media behaviors can help fish and wildlife agencies create targeted outreach programs, allocate resources efficiently, and improve recruitment outcomes. This project will employ a multifaceted approach, combining regional focus groups, social listening techniques, and a survey of new licensees to analyze the impacts of social media platforms and personal interactions with them. The expected outcomes for fish and wildlife agencies and organizations include providing valuable insight into the social media habits of novice hunters. By understanding which platforms and content engage them most effectively and enabling agencies to effectively allocate limited marketing budgets and optimize social media engagement strategies. Deliverables from this project will provide fish and wildlife agencies and organizations with a comprehensive social listening inventory, determining how novice hunters use these platforms, a detailed report on regional focus groups, and survey findings for optimizing the use of social media for novice hunters in the Southeastern and Midwest regions. Key topics and terms will be identified for building the survey questionnaire, and a report summarizing key findings will be produced. To increase efficiency and recruit participants, there is a need to continue understanding social media platforms to recruit new and beginner hunters to be the best possible stewards of the limited funding available for recruitment, retention, and reactivation. Without funding for this project, recruiting and retaining new participants in hunting through online platforms will be limited without knowing more specifics of how to reach this specific target audience on social media.