This article is not going to teach you how to create a fan page of your pet, or how to find new friends for your dog in the neighborhood. It is about how to use puppies and kittens to increase the engagement of your posts in the social networks.
If someone considers himself as an active social media user, then, with no doubt, he is having some of the following habits:
Using the picture of a pet as his profile picture. Here the definition of pet is very wide and is more like "cute animal". It can vary from cats and dogs, to lemurs and owls. And even fish. Especially if it's the clown (Nemo-like) fish.
Likes and shares pictures with cute little kittens, puppies, and baby lions.
Reads something if there is a cat or other cute animal on it.
A quick check in Google ad words shows that the monthly searches for "cats" are around 823,000. "Dogs" are with even higher results - around 1 million. Owls, with their big eyes, have surprisingly high results with over 100,000 searches per month. Even lemurs are performing not badly with 18,000 searches per month. Those results reflect and can be easily noticed in social media channels as well. Cats and puppies are dominant in the social networks. The grumpy cat, for example, has her own Instagram, Youtube, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. Just check how many followers this cat has.
Do you know how many searches per month your product or service has? And how many are they for your company in particular? Google says that one of the leaders of junky food - the "pizza" - has 860,000. "Earrings" are Googled 228,000 times, and "Carpet cleaning" - 99,000. Simple mathematics and... cats and dogs rule the internet! So better use this trend to improve the social media performance of your business pages.
This trend has its rational explanation
"A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not."
― Ernest Hemingway
And not only the cats have it. Animals in general are expressive creatures. Very often people see human-like features on them. And vice versa - people are being called "cow", "fox", etc. because of a specific feature of the animal. We love them. They are cute, funny and adorable. This explains why even people who don't have pets at home love them online. And the ones who have pets describe them like part of their families. All this love replicates naturally on the internet.
Some facts about cats and dogs:
Several decades ago cats were kept in the house because they are very good hunters - to catch mice and even rats. They were protecting the house by preventing the mice to eat the food and infecting it with diseases.
The dog is known as "man's best friend" because of some specific functional roles this animal has, and became popular within years of living among humans.
Two of the most popular dogs online: Manny the Frenchie and Boo the Pomeranian
Pets are cute, but... how can they work for your business? In the real life they can't, but in the digital world they are very wanted workers.
Pictures, ads, and all types of communication in the social networks have higher audience engagement than the ones with logos or graphics. You can test it. Your report is boring? Put cats. You want to highlight something important? Use cats. If not cats - cute puppies will work perfectly as well.
Guess what is this Facebook ad about? It's not a veterinary clinic. Would you click on it if there was a chart, logo or digitized human figures? Most probably not, especially if you had known it's a digital agency ad.
Here are some of the benefits of using pets in your social media communication:
Content engagement - pics, texts and videos with pets go viral easily
It is fun - doing business online using pets brings you fun. You know it - you adore them too. Pets make it easy to use humor
It's inspiring. They are so cute, playful and full of surprises, that integrating them in your campaigns is just a matter of will not of ideas
Merchandising - your logo gives exactly "0" emotions to your customers. While a cute cat, bat, or colourful fish will make them smile. They will remember, evaluate and accept things branded with pets. You can start with online greeting cards. But don't forget to put your logo on them.
Popular or just cute animals - you have to decide whether to post images with popular pets, taking the risk to be boring or to act in creative way, using custom images, and taking the risk to be... boring again.
Hashtag it. Find the #cat trends on the different media. Create your own hash tags like: #OurCatSays or #KatyRestaurantCatRubric. This will help you to organize the "cat" communication in one place. You can even add specific visual elements, which will make your rubric even more recognizable. Include this type of communication as regular posts in your campaigns.
Measure the results - give your initiative some time. Do not make general inferences based on the first post. Try at least several options before taking the decision whether to continue with this communication or not. Post similar content at different time, targeting different audiences (we know women respond more than men, but this doesn't mean that men don't like the content). You can hardly measure the cuteness of a pet, but you can measure the benefits of using it for your social media communication.
Test, test and test before taking the final decision whether it's worthy to use pets or not. We are not living in Ancient Egypt to have our cult of the cat. But in our modern world the cats are part of our social culture and they are even more valuable, having a dose of "magic" around them. They can transform social media communication into money. Good to know how they do it.
