Animals have served and entertained humans for about as long as we waltzed out of Africa all those millennia ago. In particular cats and dogs have held special places in our hearts and lives. But only recently have we been influenced by our pets via the very human of all frameworks, social media. Taking photos of your dog doing cute or funny stuff and posting couldn’t be easier right? Well no… but it hasn’t stopped the few animal lovers that do, and do it well from making so serious (even life-changing) income from pumping out public pics of their pooch!
But what do you actually need to know if you are looking to embark (pun intended) on a career as an agent to a fluffy influencer? Well here are four tips to get you started and to hopefully put you and your furry friend on the road to pet influencing success!
1. Learn about social media
I know this seems obvious, but you would be surprised how many pet lovers or people, in general, feel they have a great handle on social media because they use it every day. Which is akin to saying you a great chef because you eat food every day. Social media, like any platform or pursuit, can get more complex the more you delve into it. And getting people to react, engage, and hopefully follow your content borders on a science (behavioural science actually). So our recommendation is to perhaps start with our article on Social Media 101 and get an idea of the platforms and more importantly how best to use them.
2. Choose an aesthetic and tone and stick to it!
You mightn’t think your dog needs an aesthetic look and feel, I mean… it’s a dog. But you would be surprised just how bad a page or feed can look if there isn’t at least a minimal amount of continuity in terms of colouring, or styling or the image content. Not to mention it can be crucial to find a part of your animal that is unique, like a cute underbite, or the colouring of their fur, and then capitalize on that uniqueness as a theme to make your posts stand out from all the other pictures of dogs and cats on Instagram. I.e. imagine if you had a cat that looks a bit grumpy in the face. Or a dog that looks like it’s smiling. It’s proven that identifying and exploiting what makes your animal unique can be a winning formula, at least to start with.
3. Have a growth and engagement strategy
It’s one thing to have a goal to turn your pet into a fluffy influencer, and very much another thing to build a strategy that helps you get there. Even more difficult to keep up the motivation to enact and stick to that strategy, particularly when it feels like things aren’t working out as planned. From a top-line level, the two key cornerstones of your influencer strategy are planning out your content into a schedule or calendar so that you are not randomly trying to think of content each day on the fly. And second is to have a plan to engage with your audience. At least try and dedicate 30mins a day of uninterrupted engaging with like-minded accounts. Engagement and planned content are powerful allies in the day to day battle for Instagram attention.
4. Have fun!
Ultimately the main motivation you would have noticed that many successful pet influencers (agents) have is that they enjoy and have fun from what they do. And this comes through in their content. So it is important that you really enjoy creating content around your animal, really love engaging with people online, and take some comfort in the fact that for all the millions of pet influencer accounts out there, only a handful have made their humans very wealthy, or even paid their bills. The expectation for success can be the main inhibitor of your creativity. So let it go, and have fun with your fur baby!
