Every homeless pet has at least one person or family out there who is their perfect match. The person who will love and give that pet a wonderful life. The family that sees that homeless animal and instantly knows it is their pet of destiny.
The challenge for shelters, like ours, is finding and reaching those people, so we can effectively introduce them to their ideal pet. It is a difficult task. How can we get the faces and stories of these animals seen by the folks who want to adopt them? Well, luckily, we can achieve this goal through the power and tools of social media. But only with your help.
Every day we post photos and stories about the County Shelter’s adoptable dogs and cats on our FOTAS Facebook and Instagram pages, hoping to reach as many people as possible who are looking to add a furry friend to their home. But the number of people we reach with each post depends on how many people share it with their network of friends.
If everybody shared our Facebook and Instagram posts about adoptable pets, it would greatly expand our audience, helping us to reach more people who might be “the one” to adopt the pet being promoted.
Just one click can make all the difference — Share a Post, Save a Life
There is no better way than social media to promote the shelter’s adoptable pets to a vast yet targeted audience. Just one “like” or “share” can reach hundreds, if not thousands, of people in a way that grassroots promotion cannot. Last month on Facebook, our posts reached well over 300,000 people.
Thanks to our social media, people have come from all over the United States to adopt pets from the County Shelter. Folks have traveled from such regions as Texas, Chicago, Massachusetts and even Europe to pick up dogs and cats that they saw on our social media.
It helps us reach even more people when FOTAS volunteers, like Martha Anne Tudor, already have thousands of Facebook friends and she posts or shares a post about one of our adoptable pets. Her posts have helped the shelter adopt out more than a thousand dogs and cats. She usually promotes the pets that need extra tender loving care, like a sad and badly neglected dog named Kai, whose post was shared nearly 70,000 times around the world. Or Wink, a one-eyed dog, who desperately needed a home and was adopted by a woman in Nantucket. She flew to Aiken and took him home, where he’s enjoying the good life. Then there was Dante, a puppy with a life-threatening birth defect. Her post about the sick pup helped to get him adopted and he’s now cured and doing great with his family in Aiken.
We would love it if you’d join us
So, if you follow the FOTAS Facebook and our Instagram pages, be sure to “like” and “share” our posts. It just takes one click with your finger and could save a shelter animal’s life. If you don’t follow our social media, please do so. We’d love to have you join us in our mission to find loving homes for all of the County Shelter’s adoptable pets.
Their lives are in our hands.
By Bob Gordon, FOTAS Communications Director
