Keeping afloat in the social media ocean: how to post great dog content on your media feed

So you want your dog training school to have an active social media presence – a feed full of useful and informative posts, not a bunch of pictures of cute puppies (as much as we all love those). How do you find those meaty posts to share with your audience and give them food for thought? The internet is a big place these days, and finding that first doorway into the active world of dog science and behavior writing can be hard.

Maintaining a feed packed with shares about the most recent and interesting dog science is something I have done for fun as well as for pay, and I have a few suggestions to get you started in the right direction.

• To share a lot, you have to read a lot! There is no getting around this one absolute requirement: you must follow a long list of interesting people. This list must be dynamic, because bloggers come and go, so maintaining a healthy list of them involves continually adding new entries. Start with Zazie Todd’s excellent and slightly overwhelming list of the Pet People to Follow in 2018. When someone on your new list shares something from someone you haven’t heard of, check them out. If you’re not sure, default to following them. You can always unfollow them later.
• Check your feed frequently. When you're following a bunch of people, interesting links will rapidly scroll past and be lost in your timeline. When I was being paid to maintain content in a dog science laboratory’s Twitter feed, I checked Facebook and Twitter three times a day at least. (I will admit that with my smart phone I often did it more often than that, but three times was my minimum.)
• There are, however, some tools out there to help you keep the fire hose of posts under control. Nuzzel is an app that curates your friends lists on Facebook and Twitter and generates the list of links that those friends shared today. It prioritizes links shared by multiple people as those most likely to interest you. This app has been invaluable to me during dry spots when I was having trouble finding good dog posts because everyone was posting about recent crazy happenings in American politics.
• Another great app is Buffer (and there are others like it). This app lets you schedule your tweets so that you can browse and collect good content all at once, but parcel out sharing it over time. This keeps your audience from being overwhelmed by bursts of content and then losing interest during dry spells. (Although one morning I was catching up on sharing information out of my Twitter feed, and noticed one person responded to my sudden deluge of shares with the tweet “@dogzombieblog is on fire this morning!” That was a good thing. But not if you can’t maintain it!) This app is particularly nice because you can set a schedule and just pile your tweets on the stack for it to share out over hours or even days, without telling it when to share each one. Facebook lets you schedule individual posts, but you have to plan when each individual one will happen, rather than having a set “three times a day” schedule to fill up with posts.
• I usually just share links without comment – this is much faster and can make the difference between my feeling I don’t have time to share a moderately-interesting post, and just doing it. On the other hand, if you do have time to comment, it can lead to more engagement with your audience, which is a good thing.
• Always look at a post before sharing it; never share based on the title alone. If it’s from a new source who you don’t know well, you should read the entire post to make sure there isn’t something buried deep inside it that you don’t want to share. (I’ve often been surprised halfway through reading a post to encounter advice to use force on a dog.) If it’s someone I trust, though, I do sometimes share after just skimming, if it’s on a topic I already understand well.

Have fun! If you share stuff that you find really interesting and engaging, your audience will feel the same way. I share a lot of science, but I do share funny stories or cute animal photos from time to time. I try to make them unusual, though – for example, photos of canid puppies that aren’t dogs, like wolf, dingo, or hyena babies from ZooBorns. Recently I mixed it up by sharing a post about plant behavior. (Plant! Behavior! It’s not dogs, but surely dog behavior folks must find it interesting!) Don’t take it all too seriously – it’s part of your business, but it’s also a way to meet new friends and learn some cool new stuff about dogs.

Links post

• How not to greet a dog. This poster should put posted everywhere. Children should have to learn it with their multiplication tables.
• Blogging in Academia: What Can It Do For You? (The Thoughtful Animal.)
• Whales, Dolphins, and Human Rights
• Guinea Pig domestication (The Thoughtful Animal). It makes me a little sad when the Thoughtful Animal has another excellent post about domestication, because I always intended to blog more about that. But I guess if I’m not going to get off my ass and do it, someone has to. Also, it’s possible his audience is slightly larger than mine.
  

Links post

• America: Too Stupid to Cook

• Got a blog? Make a book!

• How to produce, publish and distribute a journal these days: that is, a scholarly journal, not a personal one
  

• Animal Minds: Radiolab podcast about animal cognition. Radiolab is my current favorite podcast. It’s so well-produced, demonstrating podcasting as an art form and not just some guy yelling at a microphone (not that I don’t very much enjoy it when Wil Wheaton does that).

• Science Online 2010: Lessons for IRs and data curators: thoughts from an academic librarian about the future of institutional repositories

Building positive online environments

A while back, rrp (after the flood) posted “burning up the thread, online political discourse,” in which she argued that “a snappy, cogent, or brutal put-down of a troll” is often rewarded by readers, whereas thoughtful, well-reasoned posts are more often ignored. Recently, Coyote Crossing responded, in “Online fires,” with thoughts about how hard it is to keep to writing such well-reasoned posts and how useful it has been to receive positive feedback on them from users.

As rrp says, writing thoughtfully and reasoning out all of one’s arguments is time consuming and challenging. Why should someone take the time and effort to do it if they aren’t rewarded? Why shouldn’t people default to writing flames, if that means that they’ll receive more positive responses?

In dog training, in order for a behavior that you like to start appearing more regularly, it should be rewarded. (When the dog sits quietly, he gets a treat.) However, if the reward is delivered too late, it isn’t linked to the wanted behavior, and the dog doesn’t learn the lesson we want him to learn. (If I start hunting for the treat bag when the dog sits, and he has stood up by the time I actually deliver the treat, I have reinforced standing, not sitting.)

It’s the same for us internet dwellers. We need our rewards to come pretty promptly. We can wait an hour for a response post that says “good job putting that idiot in his place! You really showed him!” That reward might reinforce our recent behavior of sending nasty mail in response to someone we disagreed with. We are less likely to wait a year and be able to look back on all of our posts to a list and tell ourselves, “I did a good job this year of posting only polite and useful things and restraining from making people feel bad about themselves.” That was more societally useful behavior than a rude post, but the reward is too little and too late to encourage us to do more of the same in the future.

Coyote Crossing suggests that, in fact, he has started receiving rewards for his more thoughtful posts this year, and that that’s been helpful to him. That’s good news. Is it extensible? I’m dubious that we can all just choose to reward people more for their thoughtful posts, and refrain from rewarding people for their snarky posts (no matter how much we agree with them), but if we can, it would go a long way to improving the emotional environment of the internet. I love the idea that eventually we could all develop an online community in which thoughtfulness was valued more than cutting rhetoric.