The Busy Pet Groomer’s Guide to Social Media: Where Should You Focus?

Facebook

Arguably, Facebook was the first truly global social network. While it started out as a platform limited to college students, it’s now expanded to include over 1 billion users from various countries and age groups.

The Pros:

• Huge user base = wide reach
• Easy to set up a page for your business
• Easy to house and display new photos
• Post-scheduling feature so you can post during peak activity time on the site

The Cons:

• Popularity with younger age groups is starting to decline
• Algorithms used to decide what content is shared and with whom means that not all of your fans will see your new content

Twitter:

Twitter is another major social media phenomenon, with over 140 million users across the world. With Twitter, your posts are limited to 140 characters, so it’s good for sharing short announcements, as well as links, photos, or videos.

The Pros:

• Search feature allows you to find competitors based on keywords – and allows potential clients to find you
• Wide reach across varying age groups

The Cons:

• Profile restricted to 160 characters, meaning you can only share limited information
• No easy way for potential clients to view galleries of photos you’ve shared
• Character limit may tempt you to compromise on spelling and grammar, which can reflect poorly on your business

Instagram

This application is growing in popularity, particularly with younger crowds. It’s an image-based platform that lets you snap a photo, apply a filter to edit it, and share it with your friends and followers.

The Pros:

• Great for sharing photos and building a profile that highlights previous projects
• Even if you’re not a great photographer, filters will improve the quality of the photos you post to make them look more professional
• Pictures of adorable dogs and cats are incredibly popular on this platform. Your content has a good chance of going right to your target audience
• If younger members of a pet-owning family home find you, you could indirectly reach the adults who make the big grooming decisions

The Cons:

• Image-heavy platform means less space and attention for text and information about your business
• Fewer older users than sites like Facebook
• Links are not clickable in photo descriptions, making it more difficult to share your content and get potential clients to your website

Pinterest

Pinterest is another image-based platform. It’s relatively new, but it’s seen a real explosion in popularity. You can use to “pin” images to your online board, re-pin images from other users’ boards, “like” photos, and leave comments.

The Pros:

• Sourcing is easy – when an image is re-pinned, the source and pinner are automatically re-pinned as well
• Easy to share your own photos, but also to get inspired by creating boards of other people’s grooming work
• “Secret” boards let you pin photos for your own personal inspiration without anyone else seeing them
• Popular with older users

The Cons:

• Image-heavy platform means less space and attention for text and information about your business
• Tons of content from all over the web means your posts can easily get lost

So where should you focus?

There’s no one social media platform that will reach everyone – social media can easily turn into a huge time vacuum, so many users will focus their attention on a single account. Before diving in and creating your own accounts, do a little research into what platforms are best for reaching your target audience. For achieving a wide reach, Facebook and Twitter are great tools. But if the thought of maintaining and regularly updating two major social media accounts has you tearing up your jam-packed day-planner, don’t despair – third-party sites like Hootsuite let you manage posting, messaging, and activity for multiple accounts through one handy interface. For displaying images of your work, it’s hard to beat Instagram. Pets are huge crowd pleasers on the platform—who doesn’t love to see a tea-cup sized puppy receive a nice bath? Consider checking out LinkedIn, too. Once you’ve set up your profile it’s relatively low-maintenance, but it’s an easy tool for networking with other professionals.