Did you know that 60 percent of all Americans own a pet?
That means many people are interested in following pet-related pages online. And if you aren’t taking advantage of this, you might be missing out.
In recent years, consumers have started to expect a business to have a social media presence. Without one, potential customers may turn to other locations.
A bad social media account can also spell danger for you too. After all, social media account is what people will think about your business.
You don’t want to lose customers with something as easy as social media. Lucky for you, we’ve compiled the best tips for creating social media for pet stores. If you take our social media tips, soon you’ll be seeing customers bark for more.
1. Use Great Media
The first step in creating a great social media is to create great media. With pets, in particular, you need to have quality photos. A cute dog isn’t as cute when the photo looks bad.
Great media also means you can’t stop with photos. You need to have video as well, and you need to produce it well.
Social media tells consumers what your business is like in real life. Associating bad photos with your store may drive them away.
A fortunate aspect of pet social media is that people love to take photos of their animal. Ask people to send in photos for you to feature on their site, then take those photos and use them as advertisements on social media. You can also use sites like Pexel to find public domain photos.
2. Join an Organization
Pet retail groups are common organizations to find. You should consider joining one with your store.
This helps your social media by giving you a community of other pet store owners with great advice. If you’re starting on social media, some peers may be able to help you.
Your customers will also appreciate that you’ve joined one of these organizations. Often it means that you have to abide by certain pet-saving rules.
Finding social media followers often means finding loyal customers. Showing them that you care will mean they will take the effort to find you online. Read more details about these organizations online.
3. Give Helpful Tips
Pet owners are always trying to learn how to better take care of their pet. They may search on Google almost every day for answers.
Help your users in this search for more information with your pet store social media account. Instead of limiting yourself to fun captions, also include helpful pet care tips.
This helps your followers feel like you care about their pet’s well-being. And you may see more shares on this style of posting.
4. Host a Contest
You should also consider hosting a social media contest for your account. These are common forms of advertising on social media.
You can do it in a few different ways, but what works well is to ask customers to tag two or three friends in your post. This makes their friends look at your account, and they often will enter themselves.
After the contest is over, you select one of the commenters at random. Then you give them a small prize.
The prize can be a coupon to your store or a free item. Make sure it is worth it as users may not take part in the contest if it is too small.
As a pet store, you can do more with this though. Ask users to send in their cutest photo of their animal for you to judge.
You could ask your followers to judge the animals if you want to prolong the contest. This will create more engagement than it would otherwise.
Be careful when doing this type of contest though. People may become mad if their furry friend isn’t the cutest. That’s why letting other followers decide may work better.
5. Work with Influencers
In case you’ve missed it, Instagram accounts for dogs are becoming popular. Pet owners create these for their dog and post as if they are them. Some of these accounts have millions of followers.
Work with these influencers to help your pet store. You may even have some local influencers with thousands of followers.
You can pay them to post about your pet store. Their followers are often pet owners as well, and this will give you some exposure.
These influencers may also be willing to do a social media takeover. This is when you let someone else post on your social media account for the day.
This helps both you and the influencer get exposure. If you have a significant amount of followers, they may even do this for free.
6. Ask Users Questions
There’s no doubt that people love to talk about themselves. And people with pets are no exception, and if they love their animal, they’ll want to talk about it.
Take advantage of this by giving your followers an opportunity to talk about their pet. Post a photo or video and then ask a question along with it.
Then, interact with those answers. On Facebook and Instagram, you should like and comment on their comments. And on Twitter, try retweeting and responding to some of your favorite answers.
Here are some example captions you can write:
- What’s the funniest thing your furry friend does?
- What’s your favorite memory with your pet?
- Are you a dog or a cat person? Why?
- What’s your pet’s name?
- Caption this photo!
As you can see, these captions can be simple, but people will want to answer them. This will help you boost engagement on your pet store’s social media.
Looking for More Social Media Tips?
Now that you have social media tips for your pet store, you should be ready to start posting. After some time, your success on social media will make you purr.
Did you like this article? Check out our business blog for more like it. And if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.