While strictly speaking this post is more about dogs in social media than marketing per se, I just couldn’t resist a post about an article on Mashable which reported on a Lab 42 study and infographic about the number of dogs on Facebook. It seems that about 14% of the people in the Lab 42 study had created Facebook pages for their dogs, consistent with a UK study also reported on Mashable, which found that 10% of all UK pets have some sort of social media profile, including not only Facebook, but also Twitter and YouTube. No mention of dogs on Linkedin, I’ve seen a number of dog-business interest groups, but no canines yet.
When I first saw these articles, I wondered how this squared with Facebook’s Terms of Use, which I thought limited profiles to real people, who are also permitted create pages and groups for other entities. When I read the fine print, it just prohibits people from creating profiles without permission from the person being profiled; given the large number of dogs on Facebook, I assume they fall within the rules.
Checking a couple of the dogs I’m associated with on Facebook , Rufus has a personal profile, while Satchel has a page. I’m also friends with a few profiles that represent Bull Terrier kennels, an entity that I think is more human than canine, but perhaps a gray area. The most popular Facebook dog with over 1 million fans for his page, is Boo the Pomeranian.
NOTE: I recently noticed a thread on the Facebook group “AKC Judges Report Card” discussing whether judges should friend dogs, specifically dogs that might be shown under them, on Facebook. The thought that the dogs might want to be careful who their friends are never crossed my mind when I created this post!
