Facebook is great!  It has helped us to connect and share our posts with over 32,000 Facebook fans in Illinois. Many of those fans re-share our posts and many lost dogs have been reunited with their owners.  But not everybody is on Facebook.  That is why we have branched out to include other social media sites in our toolbox.  Pinterest is a hot new social media site that we are on. Or, if you like your messages short, sweet and easily searchable; you can “follow” us on Twitter.

For efficiency, we have linked our Facebook account to our Twitter account so that our Facebook postings automatically are “tweeted”.  But Twitter requires that we keep our “tweets” to only 140 characters. So, we try to get all of the important information out about  lost or found dogs in the briefest way possible.  Then, if somebody sees a tweeted lost or found dog from their area, they can click on the link for more information.  Or, if the dog isn’t from their area, they can ignore it. Twitter also gives the account user the ability to “retweet” the posting to their followers. One retweet from an influential user (think celebrity or a media outlet like a newspaper or radio station) can result in our tweet going to thousands of people.

Did you know that you can search Twitter via hashtags? A hashtag is a word or phrase prefixed with the symbol #.  For instance if you want to see all of the dogs missing from the Springfield area – you can simply type #Springfield into the search box.  You will get our missing or found dogs but will also get all of the other news and information about Springfield.   Be aware, that there are other cities in America named Springfield, so you might get search results from those also.   If you want to see all of our missing and found dogs, regardless of location, you can follow our Twitterfeed at @LostDogsIL.

A note about hashtags:  They must be all one word to work.   Buffalo Grove must be typed #BuffaloGrove.  Capitalization isn’t important.  #buffalogrove would get you the same results in the Twitter search.  So, when you see our Facebook posts without spaces between the words and the # symbol in front, it isn’t because we can’t spell!  It’s because we are trying to maximize our exposure so that more lost dogs get home!

Thank you for “sharing”, “pinning” and “retweeting” our postings. You are saving lives!