I recently viewed the AKC’s webinar on “Finding Your Social Media Voice” which featured Brandi Hunter, the AKC’s Vice President of Public Relations and Communications. Ms. Hunter is clearly fluent in and enthusiastic about social media and covered a large amount of information in the hour scheduled. I think I’ve got a fairly good grasp of the topic, and still felt like I was drinking from a fire hose of information. I am going to provide a broad overview of the webinar in this post, and plan to come back to it to cover more of the tactical details. I hope AKC Education will bring Brandi back to share more of her knowledge of this topic in future webinars.
SOCIAL IS BIG
Brandi shared that over 3.3 billion people use social media and the average person has almost 6 social media accounts. More than 4 out of 5 of small to medium size businesses use social media. She feels all dog clubs can benefit from using social media to reach out to their members, potential members, exhibitors, and the dog-loving public.
SEVEN SOCIAL TIPS FOR DOG CLUBS
Start with one social media platform that best fits your content and abilities, but please create a social presence! Social media is an important outreach tool, especially for younger audiences.
Assign no more than one or two people to be the primary voice of the club so you have a consistent voice and tone
Always be on the outlook for things your club can share with other dog lovers
Social media is all about engagement, more important than the number of people who see or like your pages are the number of people who post and share your content. Give them a reason to comment on your posts and encourage their interaction by asking for shares, comments, pictures, and videos.
Post consistently, this can be one of the most difficult things for dog clubs who have one big event a year. Share what your club and members are involved with throughout the year, not just leading up to or on your event weekend.
Share relevant content from other places, the AKC has multiple social media accounts and plenty of content worth sharing.
Make sure multiple people have admin access to the club’s social media, using a club email address as one of the admin accounts, for example, “social@myAKCclub.org” is a good idea to make sure someone from the club can always get access to the account.
THE SOCIAL BIG THREE
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the three most popular social platforms. Each can be used to promote clubs and their events, and each has strengths aligned better with some uses than others.
FACEBOOK
Sixty-eight percent of all adults in the USA have Facebook accounts, and it is the second most popular place to watch videos (after YouTube). Half of all Americans who don’t have Facebook accounts live with someone who does.
Facebook is the most versatile of the three platforms. It allows the use of videos, images and longer content than either Twitter or Instagram. You can create event pages, public and private groups and can live stream events through Facebook. Each of these tools can serve clubs to help build community and share news about their club and its activities. Creating a page for a specific event makes it easy to promote and also share content unique to that event. Facebook is second only to YouTube in video views. Clubs are encouraged to live stream events on Facebook as long as they are not duplicating a live stream that AKC is already doing.
There are roughly 1 Billion monthly users on Instagram. Instagram is very visual, it is a great medium for promoting events and sharing short videos, but not links or long text. Instagram is owned by Facebook and has the youngest audience of the three social platforms discussed in the webinar. Brandi emphasized that Instagram users LOVE dogs and dog-related content.
The heaviest Instagram users are susceptible to Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO.) Sharing photos and videos of dogs and interesting events might trigger enough FOMO to get Instagrammers to check out your club and events. Brandi suggested that behind the scenes videos, for example, dogs being groomed, vendor spotlights, and juniors profiles were all great Instagram features.
Key to using Instagram is adding hashtags, which are keywords preceded by a # symbol. Using 9-12 hashtags on your post is a good strategy, take some time to identify hashtags that are relevant to your club and events. For starters, #dogsofinstagram, #dogs, and #puppies are relevant hashtags many people are following.
Twitter has 1.3 Billion accounts, but only 326 Million users, it has the lowest proportion of active users of all 3 platforms. To use it effectively, you need to be one of those engaged accounts, a recommended posting frequency is 5 times a day; the volume of tweets moving through any given users feed is so high you need high frequency to get noticed.
This platform moves very fast and presents everything in chronological order, which can make it difficult to track and find tweets. It limits the length of messages to 280 characters and is not as easy to use for photos and video as Facebook and Instagram. Twitter can be used effectively for customer service or event updates, where real-time information is important.
I’ve said this before, but I strongly encourage dog clubs to use social media to connect with their members, potential members, and the dog-loving public. The tools AKC mentioned in the webinar are all free to set up. Identify someone with the time and computer skills to set the accounts up, then work to find and collect content to share. There is no doubt in my mind club members have lots of cute dog photos, pictures of club gatherings and other dog-related events stored on their phones and home computers, they just need to share the image files.
One way to make photo and video sharing easy would be to set up an account at an online photo sharing site like Google Photos. From there, members can share photos from their phones and computers so that your social media team can access and share them in club accounts.
I would love to see some club social links in the comments!
Cleo has been showing Bull Terriers in AKC events and working with dogs and dog clubs since she was a teenager. Her professional career has been spent working in marketing insights and analytics in a variety of industries, including automotive, advertising, and pet specialty retail.
4 thoughts on “AKC Helps Dog Clubs Find Their Social Media Voice”
Wonderful blog content! I’m fascinated about dog clubs and shows. I’d love to learn more about them through your social media. For example, if I am not involved in any dog clubs or shows yet would like to learn, maybe a blog with “5 steps to entering a dog show” or “top 3 dog clubs for xyz breed dogs.” (I read your retirement article about changing jobs and all, and I was inspired by your situation and your blog.) Best of luck to you! Hang in there. You’ve got this! Your dogs are gorgeous, by the way. #doglovers #bestdogblog Sincerely, Jana L. Sheeder, President, 1-800 Yacht Charters, Delivering The Superyacht Experience Since 1976
Thanks for the comment, through this blog I am finding people who are curious about organized dog clubs and events but completely un-connected with them. I’ll give some thought to those ideas, I know the AKC is trying to do outreach and education as well, but it’s really the local clubs that need to connect to local people to get the ball rolling.
Thank you for sharing this article about organizing dog clubs and using social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Very good information and tips. I learned something. I will bookmark this site.
Wonderful blog content! I’m fascinated about dog clubs and shows. I’d love to learn more about them through your social media. For example, if I am not involved in any dog clubs or shows yet would like to learn, maybe a blog with “5 steps to entering a dog show” or “top 3 dog clubs for xyz breed dogs.” (I read your retirement article about changing jobs and all, and I was inspired by your situation and your blog.) Best of luck to you! Hang in there. You’ve got this! Your dogs are gorgeous, by the way. #doglovers #bestdogblog Sincerely, Jana L. Sheeder, President, 1-800 Yacht Charters, Delivering The Superyacht Experience Since 1976
Thanks for the comment, through this blog I am finding people who are curious about organized dog clubs and events but completely un-connected with them. I’ll give some thought to those ideas, I know the AKC is trying to do outreach and education as well, but it’s really the local clubs that need to connect to local people to get the ball rolling.
Thank you for sharing this article about organizing dog clubs and using social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Very good information and tips. I learned something. I will bookmark this site.