Dogs on Instagram

What makes a post on Instagram special? People who use the platform regularly could talk about a streamlined feed or a clear focus on producing photo and video content. Others may go deeper by talking about groups or communities, who’s activities energize a smaller base extremely well. While I am by no means a social media or digital marketing professional (yet), I found out first hand that dogs are a great motivator for interactions.

Did you know if you spell dog backward, it’s God? Dogs are somewhat of a divine presence in our daily lives. People really love their animals and I know that I would rather be around an innocent little treat goblin instead of interacting with certain people. All kidding aside, I was surprised to see so many comments on a recent post centered on a puppy I met at the store.

I don’t have metrics on my social media because I’m not that popular. In my limited social experiment of 21 years, I have networked with the people around me. How often though, do you find yourself scrolling by posts from those you follow? Sometimes we get bored seeing over the top attention grabbers or memes that require a lot of reading. It’s nice to see something cute for a minute and take a break. Dog posts are not limited to Instagram, but they thrive on it because the scaling of media to comments on screen at a given time is so drastically in favor of visual content. There is one current issue with Instagram: Facebook owns it. Normally this would mean plenty of support and structure, but many users are still concerned with Facebook privacy after recent controversy. I don’t think this will change the number of dog pictures we see, but it may affect overall user numbers for a bit.