Let’s be honest. Creating and implementing a social media strategy isn’t exactly easy, and it can be particularly hard for animal welfare foundations to address certain issues like:
- How do you create content?
- How often should you publish?
- How do you generate conversations or donations?
Need some ideas? Well, you can take a cue from your local animal shelter!
Local animal shelters know what they’re doing with social media. They have mastered the art of social media engagement: I am constantly seeing adorable baby kittens and their shenanigans stroll through my feed. Cute animals are the number one internet favorite and stir up lots of emotions.
Increase Social Media Engagement
You can apply these same tactics to your animal welfare social media to help increase engagement, donations and brand recognition. Let’s take a look at what works and how you can implement these tactics into your social media:
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help: People love helping out when animals are involved. If animal shelters didn’t ask people for help, no one would ever know they need money, food, volunteers and people to adopt homeless pets.
- Share success stories: Lots of animal shelters use strategic hashtags for their audience to follow. One of the most popular is #adoptdontshop. If you search for that hashtag, you will find lots of successful adoption stories. Creating a brand specific hashtag can help your audience share their success stories from the good work your foundation has done.
- Create events: Hosting any event is a win for animal welfare foundations, whether it be for fundraising or awareness. Posting those events on social media can increase the number of attendees, and, of course, raise awareness and donations for your cause. Most companies don’t realize that Facebook events are searchable by name and location. If someone is looking for something to do on a Saturday and your event is near them, it will show up in the search results.
Implementing Animal Welfare Social Media Tactics
Most foundations’ goals are to engage their audience through social media and garner awareness, but that can be difficult for small organizations. Why? It can be costly to hire a dedicated social media expert to create content, monitor notifications, manage the social media community and listen to your audience. That’s where an experienced animal welfare public relations agency can help.
If your animal welfare foundation needs help developing and implementing a social media strategy as part of a broader public relations strategy, Orange Orchard can help. Call us at 865.977.1973 to learn more.