The Power of Social Media in Adoption Today

Almost all of Gatalunya’s adoption stem from one social media post or another. A very shocking statistic, but 100% true! In today’s world, there doesn’t seem to be anyone (or very few) without some sort of social media account. By using social media we reach the largest audience possible! And I’m not sure we’d be able to do what we do without it.

Our biggest accounts are Instagram and Facebook, neither of which have an insane amount of followers (yet!!), but drive our biggest traffic. We have adopted out countless animals just because someone stumbled upon us in the “suggested” area of Instagram or saw one of their friends share a post of ours.

One of our greatest tools is our foster network! We ask our foster parents to share and tag us in their posts of their foster pets. This engages more people, especially like-minded friends of the foster parents, and helps us grow our adoption pool. Even if they don’t adopt an animal with us right away, chances are they will look to us when the time is right because of the powerful “word-of-mouth” aspect to social media!

In addition to social media being a successful tool for adoptions, we’ve found it to be a great place to bring together our various communities. We have a foster-network Facebook group that we ask all fosters to join to offer support and encourage cool conversations and friendships, or even just to meet up and grab a beer every now and then! We also use a Facebook group with our Gatalunya Volunteers. This creates a great way to get volunteers involved in other parts of Gatalunya, make friendships, and just spread news about what’s going on within our non profit.

Social media is an incredibly successful tool we use to re-home animals, but it also offers a wonderful online community for both animal rights activists and pet owners alike! We’re not saying that old fashioned face-to-face communication is a thing of the past, but we’re definitely very excited for what the future holds!