Why my dog adds followers faster than I do
Bart the Dumpster Dog
I realized right away that @bartthedog was gaining followers at a much faster rate than @waxgirl333 , my twitter handle. Not to mention the fact that he has more than ten times the number of Facebook fans for his Bart the Dumpster Dog fan page. Neither of us are megastars in the social media stratosphere (yet!) but I thought taking a look at how @bartthedog pays attention to his social media might give you an idea of how he’s added more than 3000 followers in such a short time – with very little effort.
1. Bart has a GREAT back story. Not everyone can say they were rescued starving and frozen from a dumpster on an Indian reservation.
2. Bart has a unique and consistent voice. This is probably because I have anthropomorphized Bart and his brother for the past three years to such an extent that I’m fairly fluent in Dog. His followers call him “cutey” and “sweetie” and “lovey” so I guess it doesn’t matter that he’s over 90 pounds – his voice is crystal clear to them.
3. The dog lover niche, particularly for rescued dogs, is really strong, if not zealous. I told a car dealer once that if he supported his local humane society in a big way he’d have more customers than he could handle and I was right. One woman drove from South Dakota to Minnesota to buy a car from the guy – for helping rescued animals.
4. Bart’s not selling anything. He’s just a friendly guy that sends out tweets about interesting dogs for adoption on petfinder, cool doggy news and stuff he’s been doing lately. He’s also very good at RT’ing information for animal rescue groups, so there’s a certain altruistic side to the boy.
5. Finally, Bart is always positive and never controversial. He doesn’t take sides and has no politics.
I started Bart’s accounts as a way to test some of the programs and apps for Twitter and Facebook, not to grow his profile. Before long he’ll be writing a book and signing pawtographs.
Tags: bart the dog, bart the dumpster dog, Facebook, search optimization, SEO, shameless promotion, social media, twitter, Wax Marketing, waxmarketing
March 3rd, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Hi,
As a new twitter user I think that in reality people are fed up with adveritsing campaings you ussually see on twitter. that’s is why when the see a fun real profile they are always keen in following. but how can you bypass the 2000 following limitation on twitter ?
March 3rd, 2010 at 1:59 pm
I don’t think the 2000 follower limit is still in effect, is it? Anybody know?
March 3rd, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Put me on the shortlist for that book . . . and I’m now a follower of Bart The Dog.
Hmm, I gotta wonder how Briggsy and Diva would do on Twitter. They’re the two stray cats who adopted me (didn’t give me ANY choice in the matter, just moved right on in!)
I’m not sure about whether the limit is in effect. I never got that far. I’m a member of too many social networks, and twitter has somewhat fallen by the wayside, though my blogposts are automatically tweeted.
March 3rd, 2010 at 5:28 pm
I know there was a cat on twitter that got hundreds of thousands of followers once. As for twitter I think its a great tool to drive traffic to my blog. Where did you find the Wax blog, just curious?
March 4th, 2010 at 2:22 am
thats a cool story. maybe i should try also to work with a dogs picture on twitter.
March 4th, 2010 at 4:00 am
This is very usefull artilce.
Thank you for sharing
March 4th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Cool story. I know there was a cat on twitter that got hundreds of thousands of followers once.
March 6th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
I know thera ara so many pet lovers over there. They now use the Internet to make social relationship and share their knoledge about ‘how to look after’ the pet. Dogs and Cat of course included
March 10th, 2010 at 11:32 pm
I too think people have tendency to follow some kind of funny profiles.I am not regular user of twitter I found twitter is not that much effective for building relevant traffic.
March 12th, 2010 at 9:08 pm
When I gave Riley and Ripley an account, they too got followers far faster than I did when I first setup my twitter account. I even got followers in turn from the humans behind the doggie accounts. There’s just something about it that’s incredibly effective,and I think a big part of it is because these accounts are focused strictly on socialization!
March 21st, 2010 at 2:02 pm
This tells us that a lot of people love dogs (and animals for that matter) and care about them. Twitter, as a social networking tool, has been a useful factor in engaging humans to take care of animals and the environment.
April 6th, 2010 at 10:40 am
[...] shaped your values etc. If you want to get a feel for how to do this, a great example is Bonnie’s post on social media; where the message is all business, but some of the content is [...]
April 25th, 2010 at 3:08 am
Great story about some of the side effects and results a random “social” experiment might have, shouts out!