Strategies for Growing a Dog-Centric Facebook Community
This week, I set out to attempt to grow my Facebook community, Large Dog Owners of Florida, through three separate social media posts. After about a month of managing my community, I’ve grown very comfortable with the current members of my group and love them dearly, but in order for them to get the most out of our community growth is necessary.
For this assignment, I made targeting my intended audience, large breed dog owners living in Florida, my key element for guiding the creation of these posts. After that, I made sure that the content was consistent in design and messaging, but not super repetitive in the event my audience was seeing it across different platforms and accounts.
Each post utilized a different strategy to attract attention and increase our membership. These strategies were:
1.Creating Organic Content with Targeted Hashtags
My inspiration for creating a Facebook group about being a large dog owner in Florida is, well, my dog. I’ve shared content about my Facebook community numerous times on my own social media platforms and haven’t had any success in recruiting many members. However, I had not yet tried promoting my community on my dogs’ platform, which I would think would have been a no-brainer for me, but apparently not.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CGxk333AFPa/
Having just shared this post today, I’ve already recruited 5 of my 83 followers on Sansa’s Instagram account to join our Facebook group.
In addition to that, I recruited a member who isn’t currently following our account, but found our post and interacted with it through the hashtags I used throughout the copy.
I can’t complain about the results from this small effort alone because my expectations were about as small as Sansa’s following, but I sure am excited to see how our community (and Sansa’s Instagram) will grow over the course of the day from this post alone!
2. Participating in Third-Party Communities
I am in plenty of German Shepherd and dog-related groups on Facebook, but their rules specifically note that promoting other groups are not allowed. (What a bummer!) However, upon looking through my other groups I remembered that I am part of the Gator Nation, one of the strongest and supportive communities in Florida.
I am currently part of the UF Class of 2020’s Facebook group and promoted my community there.
Although very few members have engaged with my post, the message seems to be resonating well enough to recruit fellow Gators to join my community! I’m unsure exactly how many members have joined from the UF group, but I’ve had four people request membership during the time I have been writing this article. I guess including a direct link to the group was the best action I could have taken, as I would much rather members join than engage with my post and not join at all!
3. Reaching out to Influencers
For a dog-centric Facebook group, I wasn’t sure how to proceed when it comes to reaching out to influencers to promote my community. I don’t follow or know of many influencers who share their pets often, and I feel as if the post would feel a little inauthentic and out of place with someone that didn’t create content surrounding their dog often.
When pondering the course of action to take, I realized that one of my community posts provided me with the solution to my dilemma. At the beginning of my community management journey, I created an announcement on my page for group members to share their dog’s Instagram handles. While following some members, I noticed that one of our very own has a pup that is a nano influencer with a total of 12.6K followers!
I reached out and this is what happened:
As we talked more, we agreed on an Instagram story slideshow to be promoted on her dog’s account. I created the assets and sent them her way. She immediately posted the content the next day tagging Sansa’s account, my personal account, and hashtagging some tags perfect for our group to increase the visibility of these stories. She even included the link for her followers to swipe up and join our group to simplify the process!
Even though I initially was very worried about finding an influencer to execute this strategy, this turned out to be my most successful method in recruiting members! I gained about 10 members in one day from this strategy alone. These members have already begun introducing themselves and their pups, engaging in previous’ posts, and inviting others they know to the group as well.
Over the past week, we have grown from just over 60 members to nearly 80! For a smaller-scale community, I am wowed by the results these three posts have yielded. I am ecstatic to see exactly how much my group continues to grow with the influence of all my new members.
