Is your shelter or rescue group missing important  tools that will help get pets adopted? Here’s how to find out!

Shelter Pet Project social media manager Christie Keith recently spoke at a shelter medicine conference at Cornell University, where she walked the audience through some of the basic problems she’s seen on adoption websites, and how to fix them.

“There are two issues,” she said. “One, things you can do to fix your own organization’s website, and two, things you can do to make social media sharing, particularly Facebook, work better even when it’s not your own website.”

Start by going to your organization’s website and pretending you’re searching for a pet. Is it easy to find the type of pet you’re looking for? And when you do select one, is it easy to see how to share that pet to social media?

“Ideally, you’d want language that specifically asks the person to share, and tells them why,” Keith said. “AdoptAPet.com does this, with their simple call to ‘Help me get seen and adopted!’ right above the social sharing buttons.”

Next, try the social sharing links. Do they work? If so, is a large, good photo included with the Facebook post, and is the copy for the Twitter post something that would make you want to click on the link?

“If the photo is absent for the Facebook share, run the post through the Facebook debugger, and make sure whoever runs your organization’s website sees the error messages it generates and fixes the underlying problems,” Keith said.

If there are any other problems with text, ask them to fix those as well.

If it’s not your website, but a general adoption site like Petfinder, you can still run the posts through the debugger. Going through this process will fix most Facebook sharing problems not just for you, but for anyone else who tries to share the post afterward.

Bottom line: It should be easy to find and share available pets on, or through, your organization’s website. If it’s not, fix it. The animals are counting on it!