The afternoon after we brought Paulie home from the shelter is when I got to work on social media. I had this idea to journal Paulie's day to day activities to help others better understand what it was like to adopt a senior pet. Needless to day, I had no idea either so we were all going to learn together. My first group of people were the friends already on my Facebook page. After most of them like his page, I needed to figure out how to reach many more. Now, back in 2014, Facebook allowed you to create a community page that was attached to your main account. In order to advertise your page, you paid a daily amount to boost it. So, I started boosting his page going the cheapest route like a few dollars a day for a week. I was able to get a few people to like his page within that week so I upped the boosted amount and waiting to see what happened. What helped was setting up the filters to target a certain age group, etc. and that's when things were starting to happen. Within a year or so, we had over 1,000 followers. Many of the original followers stayed the entire eight years we had Paulie.
Paulie hated getting his picture taken so I opted to doing more videos of him. I tried to post at least three times a day which some days were a challenge because Paulie would run away or bury his face in his blanket. He was a smart dog so that meant I had to be smarter in getting the photos. Sometimes, my son or husband would be able to snap pictures and send them to me. Paulie's followers knew as much as we did about this little dog. Yes, there were a few things I didn't share with them because, well, just because.
Near the end of 2020, Paulie's health was declining. I'll discuss this more in a future post. He was always sleeping, didn't want to go on his potty walks and it was obvious something was off. So, unannounced, in early 2021, I had my Facebook account and his account setup for deletion. One follower stayed in touch with me and to this day, we are great friends. After Paulie passed in July of 2021, I sent separate emails to some of the followers to give them the news. From time to time, I regret deleting his account because there were pictures on there that I didn't save after I posted.
