086- Social Media in Pet Care with Dan and Mauro
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Summary:
On today's episode Dan, owner of Dan's Dog Walking and Pet sitting, and Mauro, their Media Director, join us to talk all about social media in the pet care industry. Dan and Mauro discuss their social media strategy and simple tools and equipment we can use to produce high quality content. They also talk candidly about both the best practices and the ones to avoid when engaging on social media.
Topics on this episode:
When did they start investing in social media
Their social media approach
What content should we be posting
Name Space Pollution
Marketing tool vs value add?
Equipment they recommend
Growing your social media presence
How much time should we be investing?
Legality of posting client’s pets?
Battling the algorithms
Social media practices to AVOID
Social media opportunities
Main take away? The three parts of social media are content, production, and platforms. Build, measure, and learn from what takes place and don’t be afraid to experiment.
About our guests:
Mauro
Mauro Carignano is an Argentinian filmmaker, cinematographer, actor, and writer based out of New York.
His most recent work is a short film called CALCO ; written, directed, and starring himself.
Earlier this year, along with Josh Flitter and Sam Ehrlich, Mauro released a short film called Newport, Rhode Island. Case #191263D which was shortly acquired by shorts.tv, and made available on Amazon Prime Video not long after that. As well as a short film called Two Percent, written and directed by Josh Flitter. Currently working on a documentary called Pot Dogs, about CBD use in pets, produced by Daniel Reitman.
Mauro is a partner on Byte, a looping video platform released on January 2020.
Dan
I am incredibly grateful and amazed to look back on the journey that this business has taken me on. I have been fortunate enough to surround myself with an amazing team of staff and I have been able to create wonderful relationships with my clients. My mission with this business has always been to provide pet owners with someone who is reliable, trustworthy and caring to care for their pets, and I am incredibly honored to have been given the chance to do so for so many people within my community for so many years. I look forward to many more years of providing the best quality pet care for your pets.
Links:
Check out Mauro: https://www.maurocarignano.com
Dan’s Dog Walking and Pet Sitting website: https://danspetcare.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dansdogwalkingandpetsitting/
Dog Walker Try's Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSQ9rBMTYzs
On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRMFdgLPrlBPsIITYcaMKHw
Kyle and Caleb Roommates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWyAO8hMn5M
Let's Talk About Cool Animals: https://danspetcare.com/ltaca
Canva: https://www.canva.com
namecheckr.com to see if your name is already taken
checkiday.com for a list of every holiday
Give us a call! (636) 364-8260
Check out our pet sitter resources here
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Email us at: feedback@petsitterconfessional.com
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
content, people, post, instagram, dog, day, hashtags, morrow, pet, platforms, business, video, important, social media, create, camera, clients, company, dog walkers, engagement
SPEAKERS
Collin, Dan, Mauro
I'm calling and I'm Megan. And this is pet sitter confessional, and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter brought to you by time to pet.
Collin
Hello, everybody and welcome back to another episode of pet sitter confessional. Social media can be really hard to understand how to use it, what content to post and how to get that content. Today, we're so thankful to have Dan and Morrow from Dan's dog walking and pet sitting on. They discuss how they use social media to get more clients and to help educate them about the services that they provide. They also discuss some of the ins and outs of interacting and what platforms we should all be.
Using or looking into. Let's get started.
Dan
Hi everyone out there I am Dan, from dance, dog walking and pet sitting. And this guy over here that you can't see because we're doing audio.
Mauro
I'm Mauro from Dan's Pet sitting. I'm the media director and social media video and content creation. And that's my job description.
Yeah, it makes us look very, very professional.
Collin
This episode, we want to focus on social media and the role that it plays as a pet sitter, how it can be useful in marketing, but some pitfalls to avoid in those kind of things. So I'm curious about your guy's journey with social media, and how it's developed over time. When did you decide to really start investing in it?
Dan
So I don't think I realized I was like investing in off the bat. I just kind of saw Facebook and Twitter as just a new avenue to promote the business and I will be honest
And I do want to say this for people out there who are just getting started, I had no idea what I was doing. I, you know, I made, I think I even had a Facebook page, but it wasn't they didn't have pages yet. So I made an account with the name Dan's dog walking, and the last name was an ad sitting.
There was no page. So we just friended all of our clients, but again, it was a lot of trial and error in the beginning. And over time, you know, trying different things, seeing what works, seeing what didn't, you know, I look back on some of the content I've put out when I first started that it's, you know, it's nice and nostalgic, but it's kind of cringy
and then fast forward five years, I met this guy across from me, and he actually literally his first day at work.
I found out that he edits videos, and I was like, Alright, let's go to Best Buy and we went and bought a bunch of GoPro stuff, and he's been creating content with the company ever since.
And as we've done a lot of really cool videos together
But yeah, I think I recognized pretty early on when you could start when I started getting people actually reaching out through Facebook, which I didn't expect and this is probably back in like 2010 2011 before it like a ton of action was happening on there. But it it really has snowballed and that's actually we don't even advertise anymore. Most a lot of our business comes through Oh my god, you know, I love your content on Facebook, I love your videos on YouTube or we love your dog walkers try videos and it's just really snowballed over time. And it's just been just content creation, content creation, just trying different things. So the way we started like he said, on my first day, we drove to BestBuy and just bought some GoPros and some equipment and we just had the idea. I mean, word dog walking company, their dogs at our disposal and what better car
tend to post online then videos of dogs. So when we started doing is we just took the GoPro with us on the walk which is really non invasive. It's just a tiny little camera on a pole that you can just hold comfortably while you're walking your dog. And we just got all these different angles of us walking dogs and I just chopped them up in like, what was it? 30 seconds 45 second increments 32nd clip Exactly. So it's it that really when overwhelmed with current clients and potential future clients because the current clients saw their dogs posted online they're like, Oh my God, look at Bo which is walking around in the video that's so cool. And they would share that video with their friends. Give us more exposure that way and new clients will see this and say hey, I want to cool video my dog I'm going to sign up with them one because I need a dog walker into because they make videos and they're gonna make a video of my puppy. Oh is it
It's sort of a win win for everyone. And it really doesn't cost us anything because we are recording the video while we're walking the dog. So it's not really like we're going out of our way to record the content. And that's just basically the simple formula that we started with. Five years ago, I think we even had it where we did a staff meeting where Mauro actually stood up in front of the group, and showed them the five different angles they had to get with the dog. So we started passing the gopher around. And what did we do, we created a page on the blog, we would send that page to the client, the client would then post that online. And it was kind of pre exposure by giving the client something for free, which was a nicely curated video of their pet and a lot of people we've actually had it where it's on the sadder side but we do deal with this in this industry, you know, dogs or cats are going to pass away over the years. And we've actually gotten a lot of really nice messages from clients. Like you know, I'm really happy that I had this video to look back on my dog. You know, obviously, you know
Now everyone has tons and tons of pictures of their pets. But, you know, it's nice to give little bits and pieces of content that's really created specifically for each pet owner. I think a lot of people really appreciated that in the beginning. And it really snowballed from there.
Collin
Sure. Sure. So So Mauro, what is your background in media and in production and that kind of stuff? Because it sounds like you were you had a lot of to disposal knowledge already coming into this.
Mauro
Yeah, I would say knowledge. Well, I've always been the kind of person to just be interested in just making videos for the sake of making videos like in high school, I took a TV production class and I just fell in love with the production aspect of making videos. And then in college, I took a media studies, I was a media studies major, and I had a focus on film production. And there were all these classes about film production, and then it was great. I didn't like the learning aspect of college.
So, I just started making videos on my own. And this was around the time that I don't know if you know, the platform vine came out.
I started making videos on Vine and like it really took off. And like, I thought, Hey, I could probably make videos for social media and people will enjoy them. And two years later, I find out that hey, maybe this can work for a dog walker company. Yeah. So, you know, I'm self taught on editing on cameras and all that it's really just sitting down and figuring things out for yourself because then you actually remember how to do things your own way. And that's how I was able to find a lot of my style of making videos like I before Dan, you know, spontaneously drove to Best Buy to buy GoPros I had never held a GoPro in my life. I barely knew what a GoPro was. And you know, we figured we figured out how to work it and we were able to get onto out of that. And what's great about that, and what I hope people are hearing is that you don't have to be a
An expert on day one, like this is a learning and growing process and it just kind of messing with stuff and experimenting and see where that goes over time. Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, I'm a big believer in learning by doing. And I think that I've noticed a lot in this industry people are kind of nervous about, you know, should I do this? Should I do that at the end of the day, you just got to put content out there, you're gonna try different things, you're gonna see some things that work and some things that work for a period of time, like we pretty sure we beat that. The GoPro video thing to death we made, I think about 130 or 140 of them. And then we moved on to different different other content styles. But it is really important that, you know, even if you're not a creative person, look at content that you like, see things that you can try to emulate, and just try, because I mean, it's funny that the first day we got the GoPro
Mario actually almost broke it. And I was like, What am I doing? Like, I barely know this guy I just spent like a week lay the company did not have nearly enough money for me to go out and buy all this equipment. But I was like, you know what he seems to know what he's doing. Let's give him a shot. And almost immediately was playing with it, like, broken. I was just like, what is happening? I'm happy. I'm happy stayed.
But yeah, it is really important for people to know that, like, you gotta, you got to be able to just go out there and try things, people that seem intimidated by, you know, people in the industry that see other content that seems very well produced, you shouldn't be intimidated, because if you compare the content that we're putting out now, the content that we created five years ago, let alone before I was involved seven years ago, eight years ago. There is definitely a quality curve, that it's very easy to get over. And it's just a matter of putting content out there.
And just making sure that you're doing it for in the best interest of the business that's going to get there. Yeah, if if people do want to see the progression, I would go to our Facebook page, and just go to the images and just go backwards to the beginning and you will feel much better about whatever you're putting out, because it's gonna be 100 times better looking than when I was first.
I'm pretty sure I was screenshotting stuff that I was making in what was that PowerPoint? Yeah. Well, just remembering that there is a is a progression and I think I love the example of Marquis brown lane, you know, mkbhd go back and look at his, his first video on YouTube, you know, and then where he is now in his level of production, it's, you're going to grow there's going to be investment over time and, and as your skills increase, like all that is natural and and so we'll definitely be linking to some of those those early, early content productions by you guys. So
now that I know those are
out there. Oh yeah, there's, there's some gems be, I think the first company video which we are now finally getting ready to replace is, is pretty cringy.
So if you're not comfortable being on camera, just for everybody out there who's not I used to be so uncomfortable with someone putting a camera in my face and you could very much see it in the video. And it's taken a lot of time but you just got to put yourself out there and you got to continue to create get in front of the camera and do the things over and over and over again. You mentioned that you were doing these short video clips and you've kind of moved away from that. What kind of stuff are you guys doing these days as a company? We're doing
a whole slew of different stuff. We we recently started a little series called dog walkers try and what was the first one we did it was
was that the dog beer or the dog treats? We started with a video where Mauro and I sat in front of a camera and we tried a whole slew of
Different dog treats. And the feedback was great. So we then moved over to dog beer. We just did dog ice cream. I think we've got cat wine coming up soon. So that one's that's actually been a lot of fun to me because it's not specific to our industry. It's something that I think, from a content standpoint actually has much further reach because it's just funny. It's two goofy guys eating animal food. Which also, let me mention that throughout these videos, I'm dressed like a dog. Yes.
Just to put that out there. There. There is that a six month six person dressed as a dog eating dog treats? That's peak entertainment. Yeah, there's a close up shop.
I mean, we've been doing that. And then companies to me this is obviously company content. But one of the new things we've been doing is we've been doing a lot of 360 videos. So we had you've done anything in 360 before we got the camera.
I had no idea that the video was even possible in a commercial standpoint. But we got this bundle
called the Insta 360. And basically, the premise is you don't need to move the camera, you don't need to know what you're doing. You just point it. And you're good because it records a 360 view of everything. And when you're ready, you can just put that on the computer and you can actually work the angles that you want put in yourself, basically just an editing. You don't have to move the camera Don't forget the angle beforehand. It's all done in editing. And people love it because they had they haven't seen it. They asked us what cameras is how do you how are you doing this? Is this a drone? Because there's a feature that it turns a 360 video into like a little tiny planet that looks like you're walking around and people were blown away by that and they were commenting like oh my god, how do I do this? It's like, buy the camera and just get a Morrow and you can do it.
I think my favorite question is always what software? What app? Is that? Right? People think that we're doing this through an app, or like a third party content creation app, we'll know it's a it's a moral and a video editing software. Yeah. And what that really says is that there are a lot of options out there because I know a big question from dog sitters and pet sitters in general, just like what kind of content should I be be posting, you know, as a as a solo sitter as a small business? You know, what kind of content should I be putting on blast, I think it's really important for people to get to know you. And so you could post a lot of those selfie kind of videos. posting content to Instagram Stories is always really good. But it really depends on your skill level and your comfort level. So the better content is going to come from you being more comfortable on camera. So just starting with simple like, Hey, this is
fluffy and we're going for a walk today he is a golden retriever and he loves to eat his milk bone, starting with simple content like that. And then honestly, a really important thing is just looking at content of other companies whether it's in our industry or outside and seeing like Oh, I like that was one of the things I've always done for years is I have a massive list of saved videos on both Instagram and Facebook. And I break it down by ads funny and cute. So I anytime I do need inspiration, which luckily I have a Morrow so he is more the creation side of it, but like we spend a lot of time coming up with ideas like some of our meetings are just sitting here for three to four hours, looking at content, watching different videos and being like, how can we do this? What angle can we take with that? And you know, if something seems a little silly, you're outside the box, right? Because you don't know what will work like the one set of videos that did very well was
Little series that we did called Kyle and Caleb roommates. It had its own Instagram account. And it was basically like a dog odd couple. So I had two golden retrievers that we had adopted. Unfortunately, Pyle has since passed, but they had a very funny dynamic. Caleb is actually here sitting right behind me.
But we made a really funny series of videos where it was like but a minute long, and we shot it in my parents basement. And what was the first video we did? It was so the whole premise is, Kyle and Caleb are roommates. They live together. Kyle is a slob but Caleb is neat. And like very, you know, very, it's like he said, it's the odd couple but with dogs. And we had all these scenarios where Kyle would do some terrible thing and Caleb will have to deal with it. The first one was called where's my lunch. And if you look at the first video that we did in the last video that we did you see the quality increase again because you
were, we were doing this for what, five, six months. It was a long time. The first one it was the simple. Caleb had some food in the fridge, Kyle ate it. And then the video is just a confrontation between the cameras. It was like 45 seconds. And it did really well. People loved it. I mean, we had some subtitles on screen or what they were saying, and this weird jazzy music in the background. And it was just simple. We set up a website we started you know, just making this video these videos every week and we never missed a week. We're doing weekly videos every Friday, and people were actually looking forward to them to the point where we reach 5000 6000 followers on on Instagram, this actually kind of ran way further and beyond what we expected. We had people from around the world we had actually some incredibly heartwarming stuff was sent to us there was a little girl from I think Scotland she was 11 and she drew this beautiful picture that I have framed in the office of my of Kyle and Caleb.
We had
A lot of fan art that started popping up Croatia was very big there. We had a lot of Croatian fans for some reason, you don't know how content reaches countries or how content reaches users. But we had Brazil, Argentina Croatia, like all these people watching to Golden's is, you know, basically lived together. It was Yeah, it was very simple. I will say I am very biased as they were my dogs but they do have a very cute they did have a very cute dynamic on camera. Sure. But again, like that was something that by going and reaching beyond just like alright, I don't want it I know some people think, do I have to create content specific to you know, my potential client or do I have to go for you know, content that's gonna engage my existing customers. I think it's really important to kind of do everything across the board. And this kind of content which is honestly a little bit less robotic and kind of planted happens kind of organically is creating fun content that
People are gonna laugh at because at the end of the day, if you can make something funny, it's gonna be more engaging, and people are gonna want to see more of it. We've we've done stuff that didn't go great. I mean, we do try a lot, like sometimes it's just like, hey, let's, let's shoot this, and let's see what happens. But he is right, we've had a pretty good return on most of our content that we put out there. I also want to make a point, not every media, not every media content or video that you make, has to be a promotional video. There is such a thing as just putting content out as entertainment. Because if that if that videos, that photo is that meme, or whatever becomes viral, it's going to somehow be, you know, traced back to your company. And that's, that's some that's engagement that you weren't expecting, and that's engagement that, you know, you maybe couldn't have gotten if you did just, you know, promotional content. So just if you take yourself out of your comfort zone, and you make
video, video content or whatever kind of content that's funny and engaging, it doesn't necessarily have to be promotional for the company. Yeah, because I think too many times we can get really stuck in that of, well, I need to be putting my name out there, I need to be marketing, I need to be doing these things. But you know, we as people, we like funny memes all the time, we laugh at videos. So if you don't know where to start, start with what you enjoy viewing and which you enjoy watching and and looking across other content creators just to get some ideas and inspiration. And then do that. If you find it funny if you find it informational. If you find it enjoyable, make it and put it out there and you'd be surprised what the response is going to be coming back at you. Exactly, yes. Yeah, that save tool on Instagram. Definitely. If you're not using it, start using it for sure. Just if you're seeing something that's making you laugh, just drop it in there. And then when you need inspiration for funny content, just go back and look like alright, that's a good idea. I could pull a little bit
From here for a little bit from there. And I definitely agree from the standpoint of you don't have to, sometimes Morrow has to push back on me with this because I'm very big on branding, I would put my logo on everything if they let me.
But subtlety actually can be very important. You know, you don't want to overdo it. Because you know, because it seems desperate. And it's it's very, very easy to see that when someone is being like, Hey, you know, you don't want to be like the used car salesman, nothing wrong with selling cars. But you don't want to be bye, bye, bye. Bye Bye now. Now. Now. Now. Now, it's really important to kind of have a good even distribution of the kinds of content you're putting out there. You mentioned branding there. And one of the things I know that a lot of people run into is kind of a namespace pollution and being able to differentiate themselves, you know, have you run into that a little bit? Or how do you how would you approach that if someone's going, you know, somebody already has my name or my handle? What do I do about that? Well, I get I started this about 10 years ago. So it was around
The time where it was before Instagram existed. It was before Facebook had pages and all that stuff. So I was lucky enough to be able to grab everything. Sometimes when it comes to naming a brand, you actually before you name the company want to do a search online. So there's actually a great tool that we use because Maura and I are constantly creating
all sorts of accounts for we're constantly working on other projects outside the company. There's a website that gets what name checker comm without the ER at the end, and what that does, is you put in whatever the username is, and it will see if it's on everything Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, slack twitch every possible social media platform and media platform. It'll check if that usernames available.
So that's a great tool that we've always used to kind of check for things, but at the end of the day, shorter and more memorable, I think is best.
Now, my actual
name of the company is Dan's dog walking and pet sitting. So there wasn't a ton of crazy creativity that went into this business 10 years ago.
I knew two things, I had an ego and I wanted people to know what we did. So I put my name in front of our services.
But at the same time, from an SEO standpoint, it's actually been incredibly beneficial. Because what we do is in our name, it does result in US showing up higher in searches.
But when it comes to the whole thing of not being able to find a username, one, it's very important to have consistency. So other than our bite account, I think all of our accounts are at Dan's back there. Because you want to have it where it's not like oh, it's at Dan's dog walking for Facebook, and then it's, oh, it's at Dan's dog walking and pet sitting for Twitter. And then it's Oh, you want to have that continuity across all the platforms. But I think you know, before you name the company, it is often helpful to kind of use a tool like name checker to see
What's out there and kind of try different things out, see what sounds good. Ask your friends, you can even put like, again use like your network as a as a tool for getting feedback, hey, I'm starting this new business. And you can put a poll up on Facebook or put a poll up on Instagram and actually ask people for feedback like, Hey, I'm thinking of calling this you know, dance, cat walking. Well, you don't do that and call it dance dog walking, not the best example. But at the end of the day, you know, use the people around you as resources. You want to get feedback from people and sometimes if you're stuck in a rut, trying to figure out what to name something or what handled to get, it's good to kind of go outside yourself. I love that that resource that you gave name checker comm is just one spot one stop shop to see what's out there and and just you know, and try different variations, different combinations of things, to maybe you know, if you're already established and you already have been in the business for a while, using that to see what social media handles you may have to adapt and grab on to and maybe preemptively grab too in case you have to
ideas floating around in your head. It's definitely a good move. I think. Anytime a new social media platform comes out I think I try to grab as many variations of our name and other ideas that we have. I do the same thing with domain domain is obviously a whole different thing. Yeah, but anytime there's an idea, I try to snag every potential handle I can for that idea. We've been talking a lot about just coming up with ideas and brainstorming those things when it comes to capturing this. You know, you mentioned GoPro immortal, maybe you can speak to some of this too is what kind of tools you know, a lot of sitters just have a phone in their pocket, you know, what kind of apps should they be looking at? What kind of cases these kind of things could they? Could you recommend to maybe you know, help along with the actual production process? Well, nowadays every phone has the capability to take great video and great photos. So it's really not about the equipment is what you do with it. There is
Such as I mean, there are people shooting movies with iPhones out there. Now, if someone can shoot a feature length movie, I'm pretty sure you can get a video of a dog running in the backyard for your social media account.
But going back to the apps, if you can really get familiar with either, you know, photo editing apps, there are free photo editing apps out there, there are free video editing apps, there's iMovie. There's this great resource bowl with Canva. And Canva is fantastic. Canva is a post template platform, you can actually get an Instagram story templates, you can get Instagram posts, templates, Facebook templates, LinkedIn templates, all these different dimensions and, you know, color palettes that it's fully customizable. You don't need to know a lot about design in order to create just a beautiful either banner image or something with a dog on it. There's really so many free resources
out there that if you do a simple Google search and actually try to seek those out, I promise you, your content will get 50 times better in a matter of minutes. Just use those resources because they are out there and you don't need super expensive equipment or software to accomplish that. Or if you're in my shoes, if you find a Morrow, do not let him go by him, whatever cameras he wants, allow him to shoot whatever content he wants, and just keep them happy. But no, actually, one of the things that I've actually found to be a great resource in our industry is I've joined I think every possible Facebook group that's out there for pet sitters and dog walkers, and I use our, you know, community as a resource. You know, I asked for advice constantly on like, Hey, what do you do for this or what do you do for that? I think if you're, you know, solo person or you're just starting out, you got a couple of employees and you don't know what to look for. You don't know what you know, apps to use.
People, you know, you're not competing with somebody in Florida. If you're up here in New York, there's plenty of people who are more than happy to give feedback and more than happy to give you suggestions. There are a lot of great people out there and building that network of people, you know, professional pet sitters, dog walkers and people in our industry. You know, you're all going to be like minded people doing similar things. And it's always great to kind of get some feedback from them on what's worked for them. What hasn't worked for them. That's always it's good to know what doesn't work too. Right? Yeah. And while you're using that save feature on Instagram, if you continually like very similar kind of content, reach out to that person and say, Hey, you take amazing photos. What are you editing them in, you know, and to get a little bit more information in that because there's so much out there and Morrow, you know, you mentioned Canva, and all those things like there's, there are very easy simple steps and simple ways to get involved in this. It's really not as complicated as it looks from the outside. It's also extremely inexpensive. You already have the phone you already have
have the equipment to capture the content. It's just a matter of doing it. I will say now, compared to 10 years ago, when I first started, I even 10 years ago, I was lucky. I have a lot of friends who do film production and stuff like that one of my closest friends.
His video editing was fantastic. I was just wildly cringy. But for what we did back then we had to have like a large camera that was brought, we needed a lot of lighting equipment, we needed mics, we needed all this stuff. You couldn't record this stuff on a phone, like, what we have available to us today is a world of difference from what it was 10 years ago, and you really got to take advantage of it. And like, honestly, the best thing people can do is stop overthinking it. Just get out there and do stuff, put content out and just go go go go go. Now on that note, you know, I'm curious. You mean you guys have a pretty considerable following on almost every social media platform out there and and how did you grow that community?
Oh, wow.
A lot of trial and error. Again, a lot of the things I do is, you know, I'm a big believer in the whole build, measure learn thing. You know, you try something if it works, keep going. If that doesn't work, try something new. I mean, in the beginning, I think I went and I followed like every account. Well actually one of the things that we've done for Instagram is we follow all the local businesses, we follow local pet owners, you know, trying different things running different ads.
We've also been very lucky to have a couple pieces of content get a pretty decent exposure. We had one video called tennis balls for everything that I think collectively got, what was it like 2020 to 30 million 17 million. Yeah.
That went pretty viral. But it's it's really been a lot of just trying a lot of different things and engage, engage, engage you got to respond to
People comment on people's stuff. I'm sure a lot of you out there are big fans of Gary Vee, his whole two cents idea where you basically, you pick 10 hashtags. And then you write 10 comments on 10 posts for each one of those hashtags. And you do that every day takes you like 15 minutes, don't automate it, right? genuine content, like genuine feedback for the content that's out there. People gonna respond to it, because they know how excited I got when I first started. And I was like, Oh, my God, people are actually like, they like what we're doing. Other people feel that same way to respond to the people that are commenting on your posts, make sure you're constantly turning stuff out. And consistency is also another huge part of it. That one of the reasons I think our Kyle and Caleb series did so well was every Friday, people knew that they're going to get a new episode and
11am and people people would message us like, oh, What time's the video coming and it actually got to the point where I had family members
And friends texted me like, hey, when's the new video coming out? I was like, wait, I didn't know you watch this.
So the consistency, trial and error and really, you gotta just do research, you know, look into people who are very successful on social media guys like, you know Gary Vee,
who are some other big people.
Gary Vee, honestly, if you follow him at the end of the day, if you want to really learn how to do this, consume a lot of Gary Vee content. But look at all these different accounts out there that you see. Look at what is working. Mauro i think is gonna have some fun raising my hand.
If you're just starting out, I think it's a great idea in terms of how to scale your online presence. Start local. Like you said start with local businesses get involved with in this case shelters, get involved with vets get involved with pet stores, everything. The local business supporting local business dynamic is so big when you're starting out because why
You're getting online exposure from local businesses and you're getting exposure to potential clients, because you're not exposing your content to someone from Nebraska, like you would if you're if you're doing hashtag surfing, you are exposing your content to someone who could become affected by it. I think that's a great way to start actually have one more thing for Instagram specifically, going and searching images that are posted locally on Instagram, liking and engaging with that content. One of the biggest things that I used to do I used to sit up every night to like two in the morning on Instagram, liking every single picture of every single dog in every one of our service areas accounts that and that's another thing. I think a lot of people feel a little bit weird about like liking random accounts and, you know, engaging with people they don't know. It doesn't matter. Don't like do not overthink it. Because at the end of the day, you're not being too creepy. You're saying how cute someone's dog is like in our industry. It is pretty great because it's it's pretty acceptable.
To go up to a stranger and talk about their dog, but just randomly walk into someone and be like, Oh, your kids really cute. That's a little bit. You know, I wouldn't be going up to every stranger and telling everyone how adorable like, Hey, can I pet your kid? Yeah, that doesn't go over as well as you would think. But you know, at the end of the day, when you can bond over an animal and it's you know, Pat's, you people get very comfortable very quickly. And I think it's a very good way to kind of engage with with local communities, and then they go and look at your account, they start seeing what you do, and you never know what's going to turn into a potential client. Yeah, it's that that local thing and if nobody if you haven't been doing the going on to Instagram and searching for the local, the near you posts like that, that is really a game changer. Because when you start engaging with people locally and posting content and following other business owners, they'll start sharing things that they find funny and you know, really starting to build that community and getting plugged in with those people is just is just really invaluable.
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I actually want to throw a freebie idea out there to everybody that we're actually going to be trying we're going to be going and looking for all of the pet friendly businesses and doing a you know pet friendly business the week feature where we go out and we interview the business owner some of the employees talking about you know going to ask
Questions, you know, why do you think it's important to have a pet friendly business? How long have you been doing it, we meet your dog doing that what you do. And again, you don't need a Morrow. It's nice to have one. But there are great video editing apps. Once you just get the content edited. You could literally shoot all this on your phone. You could set up like with a little tripod, there's tons of great cheap stuff you can get on Amazon, edit a little video and then send that video back to them. And have so if possible, have some co branding with their logo and your logo. And then they're going to share that with their clientele. You share it with them, because you're not asking them for anything. You're saying, Hey, I'm a dog walking company. I'm a pet sitting company. I would love to share you, you know, share your business's story about you know why your pet friendly with the community. We actually just started this with. There's a great organization called spectrum designs. And they work with autistic adults, helping them you know, get into the workforce and they
actually create a ton of jobs over there they do
t shirt printing, they do they have laundry that they do they do a bakery. And it was great Morrow, and I went and did a tour over there earlier this week, we just got our whole order of shirts and sweatshirts printed for the year. And it was amazing like it we got to have a great tour the staff there were so excited about what they're doing. And you know, for us, it's they're right down the street from us. So it was really nice to be able to find a business that we genuinely love, their mission and what they're doing, give them exposure, and kind of spread the word of what they're like, we're not even trying to get anything out of it. We just want other people to know that they exist. And I think at the end of the day, when it comes to stuff like that, it is important to have that passion about what you're doing and wanting to share things with the community and wanting to be a positive member of the local community. You just can't get any better than that. Whenever you find something that's genuinely interesting and you go I need to tell more people about this and using your platform
form in using the people that follow you to spread that word, because that gets back to when you want trying to figure out what kind of content to produce, remembering. It's not all about marketing and promotional, it's its education, its outreach. It's helping other people get connected and letting them know of other amazing services and businesses that are in the area too. Yeah, for sure. I definitely think you know, you're not going to love everything you do. But you should be excited about, you know, make sure you find one or two things every day that kind of get you excited, in terms of what you're doing with we're going to talk about social media. We've talked a lot about the content coming up with ideas. We've talked a little bit about production apps and equipment as far as like it's in your pocket, just go out and experiment as far as as far as platforms go. What platforms do you think and find that work best for pet sitters to be on and where they should be spending the majority of their time? Well, for starters, number one, I'd say is Instagram. Definitely Facebook, Instagram. I think Facebook has its
matured a little bit in terms of it being as a platform, I think Instagram still has some growth to it. There's a lot of great tools that you could use through Instagram, like we were talking about with the local engagement. But there's also new account new platforms coming out. You know, I'm sure everyone's heard about Tick tock, we're on Tick tock, we don't have a ton of content on there. Obviously, YouTube is good. That's better for long form content. If you want to make some longer videos talking about your business, doing testimonials and things like that. We we recently got our account on bite which Morrow was actually a beta tester for byte is a new platform that was created by the creator of vine. Mauro can talk a little bit more about that. Well, it's just vine.
Research like resurrected. That's it. What I would say is Google is very underrated in the platform.
myriad because
Yeah, everyone goes to Facebook. Yeah, everyone has an Instagram, yeah, whatever might be in there. But if you register your business with Google My Business, there's so much that you can get done on Google itself. Because when you Google a company, and I don't see that knowledge panel on the side, you're not a real company.
That's, that's the way I see it. If you are a business, and you don't come up on Google, you don't exist. It's that simple. You can also go on Bing, if you're, if you're feeling lucky.
He's definitely right, though, you know, making sure that you do this stuff can be very time consuming. And as you are growing a business, it can really start to become a big amount of work that you're putting into it. Like I'm currently lucky enough where we've grown to the point where I've got a team of people. So Mauro and I really focus on this. We've got a management team, we've got field managers out doing things, but being able to really, you got to make sure you set the time.
aside to make sure you've got content on all these different platforms, and it doesn't have to be perfect, but you have to do it consistently. Oh, if you want to manage it easy or easier, Hootsuite is a great platform out there. I think they have a free. They have a free version of it. But it makes a lot easier to distribute content. And also, you don't have to create different content for every single platform. Not to go constantly back to Gary Vee, but he's got if you look for it, it's
it's I can't remember the name of it, but he basically teaches you how to take one piece of content turned into 60. And it's important to recognize the formatting on how you split up your content because I know the content we put on a byte will pop on to tik tok will throw up on our Instagram stories. And just you could reuse the content across all the platforms and Hootsuite makes distributing all that so much easier instead of having to post on 15 different things every day.
It can be very overwhelming when you start thinking of Oh, I have to come up with something for Instagram or Facebook for tik tok, or YouTube or bite for Google for being it's, it's no, no, no, yeah, you take one or two things and then you repurpose them and then you subdivide you subdivide, and you and you reuse them across that. And that just makes it a lot less daunting and continued. You know, the whole point of our discussion I'm hoping people are hearing is we're trying to push that barrier to entry down as low as possible, and to just start doing it, and and that it's really easy to get into it. Yeah, I think it's really important for people in there. Like if you feel like you have no idea what you're doing. That's how most of us started. We are still figuring out how to do these things. And we still have no idea what we're doing.
He's not wrong. We're still figuring out a lot of this stuff. 10 years later, yeah, it's it's definitely important because when you think you know what you're doing, that's kind of when you're not in a good spot. It's when you're constantly trying to figure new things out. You're never to be creating
stale content, you'll always want to be trying new things, because that's how you're going to continue to grow and evolve. Because marketing that was done, you know, 30 years ago is very different than how it's being done. Now you got to make sure you're evolving with the platform's all that stuff. Also, that state of you not knowing what you're doing is probably the best stage for you to be in. Because that's how we found Hootsuite. We said, Is there a way for us to post this one photo on five different platforms at the same time, which, at the time seemed crazy, we didn't know it was actually possible to do that. But we found Hootsuite and I literally cut my hosting things.
by five. Oh, yeah, I post I have things he has too much free time now because of it.
He just scheduled the next two months, two months of content like great, we got a lot more we could do more. Are you shooting yourself in the foot here?
But I think another really, really important thing that people need to do is get comfortable just googling stuff. If you're like, Oh, I don't know what to search for literally typed the thought you have in your head into that little search bar. And chances are there are a ton of other people had the exact same question. You're gonna find the things that you're looking for. It'll take a little bit of time, but it is a very important skill is just to really sharpen that Google like
Google is your best friend. Yes. Yeah. And again, it's a ton of resources out there. And yeah, just simple. Google Search just digs up so much, just to start with. Oh, for sure. Now, you mentioned it a couple times as far as just posting consistently, but there's that question that comes up of like, well, how often is consistently Is it is it a couple times a day, you know, I'm thinking dog, you know, solo dog walker, that kind of stuff out there, you know, are there better or worse times to be posting those
Those kind of things I see those kind of questions bubble up an awful lot. So in terms of consistency, you do want to be posting every day. And I'm going to use Instagram as an example. You want to get a Morning Post, a noon or early afternoon post and an early evening post those, that's the time window that's going to get the most engagement. The morning people are waking up is going into work. Maybe they check social media boom, they see your content. At noon, or early afternoon, they're at lunch, they see your content. Then on their way back from work five o'clock, they see your content and you're always there, you're always going to be posting at the time that people are on social media. And also you want to split it up where you're doing posts actual posts on Facebook and Instagram, and doing stories because stories stay up for 24 hours and then they go away. People can catch up on them either at the end of the day or maybe the next day that they missed it and it's always great to have that sort of consistency. At every each time of day. You can post every hour that's not bad. You can
post every two hours. But it's always great to have at least three or four posts just scattered throughout the day. So you have either different people looking at your content or the same people while while they're free. You always want to catch them while they're on social media. Also on that front, the more consistently you are posting, the more people are going to see and look at your content, especially the story, the more times you are looking somebody is looking at your story, the more the higher, you're going to show up in their feed. So if I am looking at somebody's content, two or three days in a row, every time they are posting that's getting pushed to the top of my feed. And when you start do it like we've actually seen that we've been posting more consistently with our stories, and our numbers and our the number of people going to our actual profile page has doubled in the past what like
also another thing back to the whole build, measure, learn thing, making sure that you are taking advantage of the insights on all these platforms.
worms. And if you don't know what this stuff means, go back to our old friend Google and just say, you know what to the insights on Instagram mean, but there's a lot of great data about your audience about the activity about the times a day people are active. Because once you see that you could double down on the times that are working. And you can see all right, it doesn't make sense for me to post that nine, but most of my fans are on at 11. So like, what works for us might not necessarily work for you. But then at the end of the day, if you can look at the data and actually see All right, this is what makes sense. And when it makes sense for me to post or this is the kind of content that people are engaging with more, you know, build off of that and double down on the things that are working and eliminate the things that aren't. Yes, that that data side that gets left out of the discussion, a lot of it's like, how do you know when to post well look at the data and see when the best times are to post for you and then go from there and double down on those times and make sure that you're really hitting those with great content and great photos and stories like you mentioned to that
That, you know, we've been learning about stories and trying to utilize those the best we can. And that's a that's kind of a game changer when you think of all that stays up for for, you know, for 24 hours and can get a lot of engagement. Yeah, there is. There's just so much that you can do on these platforms. It's it's absolutely amazing just seeing how this has all evolved over the last decade from like, Alright, I do I need a website to Hey, do we post on Instagram, YouTube and everything today? It's like, a world of difference. Like I had to have somebody telling me I needed a website when I first started. Yeah, and that hasn't even come up in this conversation, because it's just assumed you have one, right? Right. Yeah.
Well, and just for the general sitter, and the general business owner of Well, obviously, you have a website. Now we're talking about these other things above and beyond that. So there are things to consider and make sure you have a website obviously and that you are putting content there too. I know what you're talking about posting morning, noon, evening and do these times.
That can sound a little overwhelming. But as you mentioned, you start off this conversation Dan with of, you know, we're around cute dogs all the time. So we have the best we have the best content there. Yeah, it's all around you now, is there any sort of legal things that they need to be aware of, of posting clients, dogs release forms those kind of things before you put someone else's dog on repeating a pet on social media? I would say I am not a lawyer. So anything I am saying is not legal advice.
I do think just one and in all seriousness, as a business owner, it is important to have some good legal resources, whether it's a family friend or somebody you could bounce things off of. We do try to build a lot of these things into our contracts. We have a lot of major legal stipulations that pertain to how our staff can photograph and what they can photograph, what they can post, you know, at the end of the day, you know, we obviously want to get the best content but protecting the security and well being of our clients.
their pets and their homes. Safety is the number one priority for us. So making sure that there's nothing that would, you know, allude to a specific person being away. Nothing, you know, pertaining to things inside people's homes, we want to be, you know, because people are entrusting us with not only the safety and well being of the pets, but the security of their homes as well. So it is important to be mindful of what you are posting what kind of content you are taking, and clearing it with your clients if need be, again, speak to your lawyer. It depends on the state. It depends on all sorts of different things, but it's important to make sure that you know you clear it with your clients. A lot of the times if we're ever going to be filming things in client's homes, we clear that with them first. But they know that honestly a lot of the times clients are so excited when they see their pets on Instagram, Instagram because now that Instagram has become so popular. There are a lot of pets that have their own Instagram accounts. We actually have some dogs that we take care of
have even bigger followings than we do. I think one of the biggest is like 20,000 followers and it's, it's amazing, like, I'll look at their content and they'll they'll post a video of a picture, then within an hour, it's got like 1500 to 2000 likes. I'm just like, you know, that's that's the beauty of our industry though, because, you know, what do people love on the internet? It's puppies and kittens. We're around them all day long. So anybody out there who thinks that they don't have content? Look right in front of you. So it's cute, and it's covered in hair and it's probably leaning up against you.
It's definitely right there for you for the take. And for sure. Yeah. And again, it's the if you don't know what to post again, look down around your knees because there's a cute dog or cat that's just adorable that you are going to want to share with other people and just a simple photo and you know, you might not even have to do homework.
A whole bunch of editing or overlays or layers or text on top of it just a cute photo of the dog. Yes. You know those you see those kind of pictures all the time with hundreds of thousands of likes on them. And so yeah, yes, pretty, pretty easy. The simple things with that is just make sure it's a clear picture, it's not blurry. And you know, make sure it's a nice focus on the pet. Like one of the places we actually pull a lot of content from, is we have we do a lot of work communicating through group mates. We have a main company chat, where every day the the team is just posting pictures, pictures, pictures, pictures, pictures. So once a month, we actually go through, we dump all those images, and we've filtered through them. And that's part of the content that we put up for our images, is we just pull content from the staff because they're the ones who are out there with the dogs all day long. So if you guys out there do have staff, and you are worried, oh, I'm going to run out of content. Tell your employees to start sending pictures because if they say they don't have pictures, they're lying. They're all posting other Instagram and their Instagram stories.
We actually recently we've had it where we tell all the staff, hey, tag us in your, your story posts, and we'll reshare it, because it's a great way for you know, them to get their content shared. And it's a great way, depending on what the company is comfortable with. I mean, we have very strict and clear beats and all that stuff. So the company and the staff are protected. But it is, there's just so many great ways you can share content, great content and free content. A little earlier, you had mentioned start to go into a conversation about algorithms about the more people interact with your content, the more likely they are to see your content The next time you post and that's a big complaint that I hear of all the algorithms never show my content to anybody. How have you guys dealt with those or combat those or work with them? I don't really know how to phrase that some some days but, you know, because those seem to be ever changing. And they are
one anyone who's blamed me
algorithm for their content, not getting any likes or engagement, chances are they're not posting enough. That's, that's one of the biggest things is posting consistently. And obviously, you don't want to post every 30 minutes, people aren't gonna love that. But it's really, really important to continuously post because, again, like we were saying, people will the more people engaged, the more people will see. But it's also important to educate yourself. Look for what are the hashtags pertaining to my industry that are going to get the most eyeballs on it? What are the style of video that gets the most engagement? I know, one of the things that we did was, Morell learned a ton about YouTube. And you know, it's about the length of the video. Sometimes it's about what you're saying in the video. For Instagram and Facebook, it's about the hashtags. They're using geotags you got to really make sure you're educating yourself on getting yourself to get better exposure, but I think one of the best things is consistency.
And just making sure you're constantly churning out content. I know Mauro had something he wanted to add to this as well. So in Instagram hashtags are, you know, you live or die by hashtags. If you're complaining about the algorithm, chances are, you're not using the right hashtags or the right location. So say your so we're in Nassau County, Long Island, New York, going to bigger and bigger.
We actually say we take a picture of a dog that from right here from Port Washington, that location is going to get posted. We're going to tag it as this picture is from poor Washington. And then the hashtags actually use a resource called top hashtags. The website's top dash hashtags, calm, I believe, and you type in basically one hashtag, or one topic per hashtag, and it gives you the top 100 related hashtags. And a top hashtag means that a lot of posts
start going to the hash tag that could, you know, be good and bad, because you could have your content be, you know, there's a lot of posting going on so your content could get
brought down the list. And also, you you have, you're competing against a lot of other posts. So what I do when a lot of the hashtags I tag, local location, or Washington, Nassau County, Long Island, dogs, Long Island dogs, watch all of that, and make sure that you're posting different hashtags. Say every week, you're doing different hashtags, different locations, and just keeping that sort of accessibility with the post will definitely get you firing it. Yeah, I on that front, too. There's a lot of apps out there that will say like, you know, best hashtags to get you 100,000 likes and all that stuff. A lot of those apps are using very generic hashtags. You want to steer clear of those, because like Maura was saying it's it's going to kind of get drowned out with the rest of the noise.
But again, if you want to kind of be
The algorithm, going back to clicking through those hashtags, and liking those images, commenting on those images, engaging with the content that you want people to be engaging with, and going back and forth, even if it's not your direct customer base, the more engagement you get, the higher you're going to show up and a lot of different rankings and things like that. The more engagement you get overall, the better so you go engage, people are going to look at your content. And please, please, please do not go out there and automate the auto posting thing like, Hey, I love your dog, super cute. You should follow us. It doesn't work. People hate it when you post something and you get a comment two seconds afterwards with like four lines saying, Oh, you dog blah, blah, blah and a bunch of emojis. That's, that's a bot. That's a robot doing it, don't do it because you will get reported and it's it's nobody is going to actually engage with that kind of response. So be authentic, be genuine. And take the extra couple of minutes to write things and, you know, put some thought into what you're doing. Yeah, you mean
You know, take a couple of extra minutes and doing this kind of engagement. How much time commitment should an individual consider is oh boy
okay until we hire a Morrow
as an IT, you know, maybe they're a sole proprietor or just a handful of individuals, you know, what would you say is maybe a goal time or a healthy amount of time to be spent throughout the day? I think that depends on whether or not somebody wants to be successful or not. I'm, I'm a big believer in eating, breathing and sleeping, which you do.
It is not the most healthy approach. I've been forced to create a little bit of more work life balance in my life recently. But in the beginning, I was pretty unrelenting. I was constantly on these things. I was always inviting people to like my page sharing my content, you know, tagging this tagging that. But there are definitely once you kind of get into a flow of it like I know
Every day, Mauro is looking through our Hootsuite feeds and seeing you know who is commenting on our Instagram who's commenting on this. And we've gotten to a much better process. How many hours? Do you think we're spending collectively between the two of us a week?
Then
help me.
I would say, if you plan it, if you wing it, you're gonna be on your phone for 10 hours a day. If you plan it.
You could be spending two to three hours a day. And that's, that's high. No, no, no, no. If you're, you're starting Oh, yeah. But if you're planning your content, if you are, if you know what you're doing and what you're going to be posting, it shouldn't learn well, like it's very, it gets to muscle memory. And also, you know, when it comes to that stuff, this isn't necessarily always sitting at a desk and doing this
Like, sometimes I'll be at the gym, and I'll be like on the elliptical, and I will go and I'll follow and engage with accounts. And if I'm in the bathroom, which everyone goes to the bathroom, that's great time to take advantage of,
you know, put in some putty like if the whole two cents thing with the Gary Vee talks about for two months, that's what I do. I put in my 10 minutes, I'd like and comment. And we saw engagement go through the roof. It's really about kind of finding a groove and taking advantage of you know, if you're taking if you're in a city and you're taking a subway somewhere, you're taking public transportation, where you got 10 minutes before you're going into a client's house, with your Instagram feed, see what people are doing, go through your Facebook, like take advantage of downtime, like the fact that we have these magical little machines that we carry with us everywhere that have access to the collective knowledge of humanity means that you have zero excuse to not get this stuff done on a daily basis. Yeah, and in Mora mentioned, you know, planning a lot of people
That gets that gets kind of lost in the shuffle there as well. I just wake up and I kind of go through the days but you know, spending a Saturday or a Sunday to plan out times that you may have open for the coming week in thinking about what kind of content you want to produce, what clients are going to be involved in that week to just get some of those penciled in so that you're not waking up in the morning going, Oh, no, what? Crap, you know, what am I going to be doing today? that can really remove a lot of that burden, too. Before Morrow starts I do want to say it is okay when those days happen. So don't beat yourself up over it. If you do sit down and go to start something and you're like, I've got nothing. Take the day and just give yourself a little bit of breathing room. You're gonna thank yourself in the long run. Here's a crazy idea for everyone that you know, things that they don't have content to post. If you are walking say what's a reasonable number 10 dogs a day. That's 10 photos of 10 different dogs.
You're not going to post those 10 photos that day, keep a backlog, save everything that you have saved every photo that you take every video that you take. Because we have used videos from last year to make promo ads from last summer we repurpose everything. I have a folder, that's like 18 gigabytes of just dog photos. And it's just sitting in my computer. And I when I don't have anything opposed, I fall back on that folder. And there it is. Great. Just content sitting out there. For me. It's also nice to go back and look at some of the more
dated content that we've created. I think we do you know, we do our throwback posts every couple of weeks of like, you know, I think we've even found my own marketing materials, all the old free t shirts I got from like vistaprint when I first started posting that kind of stuff like anything pertaining to your business, or animals or anything like that.
keep it organized. I think also along the side of planning, organizing Google Drive should be your best friend. We I think we have like a terabyte plan or something like that when we just have just gigabytes in one. Yeah. And that's the other thing. It's not crazy expensive. I think the terabyte is $5 a month. And we just dump everything in there. We take the content the staff gives us we take content, we've created ourselves raw footage. And because you never know when you're going to use something like we went bike came out, we repurpose some of our tennis ball video stuff. There's all sorts of great stuff that you can redo. But another thing that's very important, which we are learning now, is you have to really catalog things well. We're actually going to be looking into bringing out an intern to help us cataloging are probably hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that we've created over the past five years. Because once you kind of have that broken up into dogs, cats breeds times a day.
season's funny, silly happy cute. It makes it a lot easier to kind of oh I need to post a funny video for this or I need a you know a picture of a cute puppy because it's national puppy day tomorrow.
Also on that front, when it comes to planning if you are stuck with what suppose there is a holiday for every single day of the year. If your holiday Yeah.
What's the name of it? What holidays today? And yeah, there's national today calm, which tells you what holiday it is. I actually started a website A long time ago that is barely active now. But I had an idea about what I did. It was what was it pet related holidays. And what I was doing was I was creating content for you know, pet people in the pet industry for every single holiday. Oh, check ID calm that's what it is. Ch e ck. Ida why, and it gives you there's a bunch of holidays.
Today, and actually today is safety pup day. I don't know what that is. But it's kind of terrifying looking. Um, there's always something out there that you could talk about, there's tons of pet related holidays. And you could always and if you don't have content if you don't have a picture of a dog with a shamrock for St. Patrick's Day, there are tons and tons and tons of great stock image websites out there that are not expensive. Um, obviously, you want to be careful with stealing content, you want to make sure that whatever you're doing is, you know, being respectful of the content creators, and making sure that you're not breaking any sort of laws by repurposing content that might not be yours. And if you are repurposing content, always make sure you give credit to whoever the content creator was. And if you don't have an answer for who it is, just say, hey, shoot us a message. We'll give you credit. And that touches off actually another question that I had, because earlier you had mentioned a practice of automating these posts.
Come on for hashtags. And you now mentioned a practice of illegally or maybe even not, not intentionally repurposing somebody else's photo, what other kind of practices out there are kind of, you know, no, no, that people should be avoiding that kind of, you know, just not tasteful or things along those lines. I would avoid buying likes, buying followers.
We tried it a long time ago, Instagram will bear it out. I did it when we were really trying to build it up. And it's, it's something that it's, it's a really, it's an ineffective way to get to where you want to be because at the end of the day, the purpose of generating this content and getting exposure from our business standpoint is we want clients and getting a bunch of fake accounts that you bought from Indonesia is not going to convert to paid leads at the end of the day. So while it could be cool from like, you know, like, Oh my God, look
How many followers they have? It doesn't pay off in the long run. It's a really short sighted way of doing things. And it's not something that is going to help pay the bills. And
it's the platform's have really picked up on it pretty well, in the past few years. I know, Justin Bieber had a dip of like two or 3 million last year. And some of that, you know, I don't know if he bought it or not, but a lot, there's a lot of bots out there.
So you just got to be mindful of that. And don't be too spammy with with content, and you don't want to overdo it. But again, if it feels kind of like asked, should I do this, listen to your gut. Because as you mentioned, people can tell when you're doing that, and oh, yeah, it really, really is very obvious. Yeah, you're not tricking anybody. Like if you go from 100 followers to 30,000 followers overnight.
People are going to figure it out pretty quickly. Yeah. Unless like Elon posted about you or something like that.
That shout out to Elon, if you want to post about us, if you're listening to this podcast, shout out to Elon. Remember to tag her whenever Yes, tag Elon in this please.
Looking ahead to the future because we've we've spent some time thinking about how far we've come over the past 10 years or plus. What kind of things are you guys excited about? opportunities that you see coming up as for social media and in things moving forward? Honestly, the thing that I find the most exciting about this is I have no idea what's coming. I think we are just at the beginning of a huge technological boom, the change in camera equipment, the change in cell phones, the way that we are interacting has changed in a way that we have never seen before. You know that the growth of technology in the past 20 years, is unlike anything in human history and the next 20 years, I'm sure
podcasts are gonna be coming from someone's brain. And we're going to be just thinking thoughts out there. And I think that the more the technology changes and improves, the better opportunities, they're going to be for business owners, for people who want to share their ideas and stuff like that. But I'm just excited to make a bunch of fun videos hanging out with dogs and build this business into a massive, massive, massive behemoth of a company to put it moderately.
Yes, yeah, it comes across.
Morrow, did you have anything that that you're kind of excited about, you know, when you look in the tech field or anything like that, that you you know, or new tools that are on the horizon, that kind of stuff? Well, most platforms now are moving towards the monetization of content for creators. So basically, what that means you'd be making money off of the content that you're creating. So YouTube is you know, there's been a lot of talk about YouTube and AdSense and ad money and how they calculate that
But we are trying to reach that threshold to become monetized on YouTube. That's the whole point of these dog, dog walkers try videos. Because at the end of the day, if you can make money off of these videos, do it because that's another source of revenue for your company. And that's, that's revenue for you that you wouldn't think of even making any other way. So it's great because we talked about this new platform bite. And they're coming out with a program to compensate creators just in house, because there is a lot of controversy with creators complaining about, hey, you are throwing ads between our content, but we're not seeing a dime off of that. But when platforms are transparent about compensating creators, I'm very excited about that. Because then these creators can either make a living out of it, or they can have some extra money in their pocket. So that transparency is what makes me excited with these platforms. And on top of that,
Once you create the content and it's out there, it's just churning and it's generating income. So if you create some great pieces of content like you guys really should go check out Morrow stuff wasn't Morrow dot mp4 and then at Morrow advice, he's a funny guy. He is definitely the funny out of the two of us.
But there's a lot of great opportunities out there for creators and I think that it's gonna be really cool, especially watching this guy for the next couple of years, when he kind of eclipses all of us blushing over here,
but that's why we don't do video.
I've been the only one doing video this whole time. I've just been staring at myself. Sorry, then.
Then Morrow, I thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day in talking to us about this, you know from the content production platforms and that kind of underlying, build, measure, learn as you go and just getting started in the encouragement that you've given to
Not to listeners and to myself as well, to start doing something and using what you have on hand. I know we've only you know, there's so much more out there. How can people reach out to you guys ask questions and get connected and follow along with the great stuff you guys are doing. So our website Instagram, Twitter, and tick tock are all at Dan's pet care. If you look up Dan's dog walking and pet sitting on Facebook, you'll find us you want to reach me You can follow me on Instagram. It's just Daniel reitman. Morrow is more than mp4 on Instagram, contact us please feel free to reach out to us directly through our Instagram. The only people who are on the dance Petcare Instagram are Mauro and I so if you have a question for either of us, please feel free to message us on there. If you want to DMS on our personal ones. we'd be more than happy to field any questions you might have.
You know, everybody starts somewhere and one of the things that I actually love about having built a moderately successful
Well, businesses, I like to be able to share the things that I've learned with people who are trying to do the same thing I did. And if I could help any of you in any way, make it a little bit easier. I am more than happy to, and I'm sure that Morrow would be happy to drop his two cents in there as well. Well, again, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure in real joy and a lot of fun. You guys, thank you so much, Collin, thank you so much for having us on. This was fun. Social media can be a big scary world. But it doesn't have to be. I hope that what you've taken away from today's conversation with Dan and Morrow, is that there are little inexpensive things that we can all do to our social media game. From simple pictures to using Canva can all help us increase engagement and help educate those who are potential clients. I did want to mention that since recording this episode with Dan tomorrow, they have actually launched their own podcast, check out let's talk about animals wherever you're listening to this right now, and I'll include links to that in
Everything that we've discussed in the show in the show notes, you can find us at petsitter confessional on Facebook and Instagram. You can also check us out on petsitter confessional comm to look at all of our past episodes as well as sign up for our weekly newsletter, Megan and I really want to thank you for taking your time out of your busy week to listen to us. And we also want to thank our sponsor, time to pet for making this show possible. We ask every week because we just love hearing from you. If you've got tips or tricks, wonderful stories or just want to share what you've learned while being a pet sitter. Let us know hit us up on social media or website, email or give us a call
