Are you struggling to sell your puppies or kittens? You're not alone. It’s a tough market right now. Selling dogs and cats is tougher than most breeders have ever seen.

Take heart! We have some solutions for you!

Social media is a great tool to grow your breeding business, to find new clients and to help match people with their next furry family member.

Joie and Alex Lee are two of the people who have been able to successfully leverage social media in their business and they LOVE sharing what they have learned with others! 

A lot of their success has come from TikTok, however, their mindset has been “how can we grow on social media?”, not necessarily just on TikTok. They are not pet professionals or pet breeders but they were kind enough to offer us some advice that applies to our profession. Here are some of their top tips:

- Short videos are the most common and highly consumed media currently. 

- They can be created on one platform and then that same content can be used on multiple platforms. For example, a TikTok video can also be used as an Instagram reel, a Facebook reel and a YouTube short video. 

- The best social media platform is the one you are going to use. 

- If you are more comfortable with Instagram, you could create the reels there and then put them onto TikTok, it is whatever works best for you. 

- If you only have time to manage one platform well, then just do one, but do that one well. 

- The biggest thing is to just get started 

Expert Tip: If you are at a loss for how to start or what new content to create, take a look at other breeders and the content they are putting out on their accounts to help get ideas of what is working for them. 

If you are just starting:

- It is important to find a creative handle (a name for your account). Using the name of your breed isn’t a bad idea for SEO.

- Try to be as congruent as possible throughout the social media platforms and do something that can be recognizable like a consistent logo, colors and fonts. 

- Once you have chosen your handle you’ll want to start by introducing yourself. A few things to share are

1. How you got into breeding 

2. Why your breeding program is important to you

3. What you do with your puppies or kittens that makes you different

4. What you love about the breed you work with 

- Connect with the viewers so they know, like and trust you. You want to give people reasons to get to know you by letting them in a little.

As a breeder I have found that social media has some extra pitfalls for us.

1. On Instagram you can not have ANY language about selling puppies or kittens. Available, can ship, looking for homes etc can cause your Instagram account to be banned. I’ve been hearing from more and more breeders that lost the accounts they have been building for years. It needs to be a cute place to look at pet pictures and that’s it. You can sell in private messages but not on the main page that everyone can see.

2. TikTok is more tolerant of breeders BUT I am currently shadow banned (none of my posts are getting any views) and I am still trying to figure out why. RutRow… I may be adopting all the same rules I use on Instagram with Tik Tok.

Make sure to subscribe so you get our next blog post on how to create topics to post about on social media.

Love,

Heather

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