You have accounts on social media and you have started introducing yourself and allowing people to get to know you…
Now what?
How can you know what to say or create? How can you come up with a constant flow of content for your platforms??
Joie and Alex Lee, who have had a lot of success with their social media platforms have recommendations.
- You’ll want to find people who are similar to you, other breeders, pet professionals, pet influencers, etc. Find people and accounts that you resonate with and use those accounts as inspiration.
- You’ll want to put your own twist on what you have seen people do, but you will be following trends, so you will be using the same sounds or the same ideas as other people. To find this inspiration for new ideas you don’t want to be scrolling through social media endlessly. Focus on specific accounts and go directly to those accounts to get your inspiration.
For example, say you find a reel from a breeder with their available puppies dressed up in little outfits and walking around one at a time. They might have a little message at the beginning saying “Meet the Puppies” and a caption that said “who gave them permission to be this cute?”. You notice that reel has a lot of views. So, why not do cute little videos of your puppies or kittens. Maybe they don’t have to be dressed up, but they could be. Then put it to a cute little upbeat jingle, similar to the video you got your inspiration from, and see how it works for you!
- You should also save videos so that you have the ideas later. Sometimes there is a lot of cute content at once and saving or liking videos can help you make a list of cute ideas for what you can do. The videos you should be liking and saving are ones that you’d like to recreate later.
- If you see something more than twice, it is trending and is something you should take a closer look at to see if it could work for you. You don’t have to agree with a video that you find inspiration from, but you just need to look at the general concept and think, “can I make something from that?”
- You don’t want to make more work for yourself, so if you already have a photo shoot planned with your puppies or if you know you are going to be posting content like this anyways, then you should constantly be thinking, can I be recording a video of this? Is this something I can create a short video about to post on social media?
- People are interested in cute puppies and they are also interested in the behind the scenes, so if you are moving the puppies from a smaller pen to a bigger pen, how do you do that? Or if today is their first day eating kibble, what does that look like? There are so many things that you do every day that people would be interested in watching and how much extra time does it take to simply record it?
A video that takes less than 5 minutes to make and is 13 seconds long, can have over 20K hrs of play time. It is literally working 20K hours for you for 5 minutes of your time. You really don’t have time not to do this.
Expert Tip: You will get hate. No matter what you do, you will never make everyone happy. Everyone on social media experiences it and you will not be exempt, but showing people what you do and especially the work side of it will help people get an understanding of how much work goes into breeding and taking care of your puppies. It’s not just the puppy snuggles and kisses, it’s a lot of work.
If you are wondering how long to make the videos, it can vary, but the trick is you want to keep people’s interest, so it should be a short video. If you are talking about something that takes a long time (i.e. cleaning a pen) you’ll want to break it up and just show short snippets of it or do a time lapse.
- You also will want to keep your videos in your phone a little organized, maybe you can have a folder on your phone that is just puppy content. This one small piece of organization can help you so much when you go to actually create your videos later on.
The content you create today can be used forever. It doesn’t always have to be brand new videos that you just shot today, you can go back and post videos from last year or a few years ago that are still cute and relevant. Maybe you see someone you follow posts a cute video and you think “I have a video just like that”, then you can take your video and model what they did and you have that ready to go because you saved the video that you created a while back. So any time your puppies or kittens are being cute, pull out your phone. You never know what will happen or when you will be able to use the content.
When you are posting content of your puppies, you want to take people on a journey all the way from when they are born and then growing, growing, and going home. You don’t just want to only tell people when puppies are ready to go home, your followers will want to see the journey and follow along with the pups or maybe with a specific pup that they prefer.
People will love your videos because your puppies are adorable! If you are having trouble seeing the cute factor of your puppies, ask for help from people around you. Ask your kids or someone else that’s around to help you make new content. As a breeder you may have gotten over the cute factor of a puppy or kitten, but try to step into someone else’s shoes and think what someone else might think is cute or fun.
Some other content ideas you might want to consider are:
- How to help a puppy have less stress when going home.
- Training tips.
- How to better your breeder program.
- How to travel with a big dog (small dog, cat).
- How to fly with puppies.
- Things I wish I would have known before becoming a breeder.
- Things I wish I would have known before my first litter.
- Things to look for with genetic testing.
- Why I send all my puppies home with…
The best social media platform is the one you are going to use, so no matter what content you are putting out, make sure you are being consistent and interacting with your viewers and followers as much as you can.