WHY DON'T WE FOCUS ON DOG PHOTOS?

It seems simple, right? We’re hanging out with dogs all day, why don’t we take more photos of them? While we’d love to spend our time doing nothing but staging photos and collecting pictures of dogs, our focus and the priority of our staff is always taking care of the dogs. This priority will not change.

This may be our favorite photo that any staff member has ever taken of Maui. He's such a good model.

When we signed up with Paw Partner, we didn’t realize how much fun it would be to have our staff be able to post photos to the platform and have our dog parents notified that a new photo of their dog was posted. But, photos on that platform rely on a few things to be successful:

1. Dogs doing something interesting - some days the dogs come in and they don’t do a lot. There are days when they just hang out with us. There are other days when they are very active, but some days exciting moments are hard to capture.

2. Having staff that are great at taking photos - we don’t require staff to be good at taking photos. If they happen to be, that’s great, and over the years, we’ve had some people who’ve been able to take some great shots, but not everyone is a photographer, and dog photography is another level of difficulty - they don’t exactly sit still for the camera.

3. Non-repetitive content - if you follow our feed on Paw Partner, you know that it happens. We try to mix it up on our feeds on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, but there’s only so much to talk about in a building full of dogs.

What we do love is the feedback we’ve gotten and how excited dog parents are when a photo of their dog is posted to Paw Partner. We try to get photos of the dogs when they visit us and when they stay with us, but it doesn’t always happen. One thing having the staff posting to Paw Partner has afforded us is a vast library of content from which to draw to post to our Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter feeds.

If you follow along with our social media, you’ve likely figured out that we usually pull the best photos from Paw Partner and schedule them to post to social media at a later date - sometimes up to two to three months later. This usually works out pretty well, unless we post about a sunny potty walk and it ends up going live on a rainy or snowy day, but it’s the risk you take with social media scheduling!

A portion of the ever-growing lobby photo tiles.

One more item of note… The lobby photo tiles. One of our most frequently asked questions is “how do I get my dog on the wall?” It’s really simple actually. We just have to get lucky and get a great photo of your dog that works well for a tile and is of high enough quality to print on the tile. We try to order one per month (sometimes more), but there’s no rhyme or reason, it’s just dumb luck.

So, while we do absolutely love taking photos of all of the dogs that come to Good Dog, taking photos will never be our priority. Our priority will always be the care of the dogs. When we have a chance to take photos, we’ll post them to Paw Partner and the dog parents will get a notification. The best of those photos will be used for social media, and the best of the best of those photos may make it onto a glass tile to adorn the lobby wall!