Facebook is one of the best social media platforms to promote your animal shelter. But you can’t do that without having a clear and effective promotional strategy. In this blog, you’ll learn the top Facebook marketing tips that will make your animal shelter stand out and get traction.
Have you ever noticed that cute or funny cat/dog videos are viral on the internet, particularly on YouTube? Why is that? It’s precisely because people want to see cute animals doing cute stuff. That’s a great starter if you want to promote your animal shelter. People are naturally compassionate about animals and would give you a thumbs up if they find you’re committed to the cause. Here are a few tips on how you can use Facebook to promote your animal shelter and ramp up your traction and donations.
Use a lot of graphics on your Facebook page
First things first, you need to have a dedicated Facebook page for your animal shelter. It’s here that you’ll post all your updates, content, articles, videos, and much more. We’ll get to that in a bit, but first, you need to design your page so it has an ornamental value. How do you do that? By making it visual and dynamic.
People (especially social media users) get appealed by visuals and dynamic content on your page. Therefore, you should have a relevant profile picture and cover for your page. The best idea is to be creative and original. For example, snap a picture of a smiling puppy with your animal shelter in the background.
Your display and cover pictures are not the only things required. You should have several animal rights posters on your page so that people know what you stand for. Crafting posters from scratch is time-consuming, so we recommend using an online graphic design tool like PosterMyWall, which lets you create banners and flyers in a matter of clicks.
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Run a charity event on Facebook
Did you know you can host fundraisers on Facebook? It’s one of the easiest ways to gather donations for your animal shelter. But you must remember that people will naturally be reluctant to donate if they don’t know who you are and your accomplishments in the past. Therefore, a successful donation drive on Facebook requires having substantial traction on your page and a good level of trust with your audience.
Once you have a significant following, you should put up a charity poster on your Facebook page, indicating the purpose of the event and how the funds will be used to protect animals at your shelter. Don’t forget to mention the link to your official website where people can donate to your cause even after the Facebook charity event has finished.
Content is king
In the last section, we discussed that having good enough traction is vital to running a donation drive on Facebook. The question is, how does one build a substantial following on Facebook? There’s only one answer to that — post valuable content on Facebook and keep your audience engaged.
What we mean by valuable content is content that adds value to your readers. It’s a good idea to have a website blog where you regularly post articles about your animal shelter. For instance, an article on what goes into taking care of animals in a shelter would inform the reader that running an animal shelter isn’t as easy as it sounds. Similarly, if you could give the viewers a brief tour of your shelter in your YouTube video. Whether it’s your blog articles or videos, post their links to your Facebook page.
Also, you won’t go very far without being consistent. You should keep posting good content on your Facebook every 3 or 4 days to keep the audience involved. Answer any questions people have about your shelter as it’ll boost engagement. Slowly, you’ll build up a good amount of traction to run a donation drive on Facebook.
Paid ads could be worth the effort
The best thing about social media marketing is that you can pay the platform to run your ads and show them to a highly targeted audience. Every social media platform knows about its users’ interests based on their search histories, so you can put up a paid ad and Facebook will show it to people who have shown interest or have previously participated in animal shelter drives.
Once again, you can’t expect results if you’ve just a couple of followers on your page. You need to have a solid foundation beforehand for paid ads to work. They aren’t a shortcut to getting traffic to you but rather accelerate results if you already have a significant following.
Videos drive the most traffic
Video marketing should be one of your central approaches if you want to promote your animal shelter on Facebook. People would rather watch a short explainer video than read a blog article. Therefore, apart from posting videos on your YouTube channel and posting links to your Facebook page, you should also post brief video snippets on Facebook as well.
This could be a brief tour of your shelter, showing the number of animals you’re keeping and how well you’re taking care of them. Another good idea is to record a video interview of a person who recently adopted/rescued an animal from your shelter and give testimony about the brilliant work you’re doing. Customer testimonials are powerful and they make you reliable in the eyes of your audience.
A few parting thoughts
Running an animal shelter is as difficult as promoting it on social media. Since Facebook is the most-used social media platform, you’d have a better chance of promoting your shelter on it. The above strategies have worked well with most other animal shelters we’ve interviewed but you must tweak each strategy and test them to make sure you’re getting the results you need.
Lastly, if the main focus of your promotional drive is to gather funds for your next project, you can’t do that without building trust. Therefore, showcase the big names you’ve worked with and the projects you’ve completed in the past. Your portfolio should speak for itself!
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