Connecting people to conservation agencies through social media posts: an examination of the power of marketing that zoos maintain

ABSTRACT

We examined one calendar year of Facebook posts by 10 AZA accredited zoos to compare how often zoos mention small, large, and government conservation agencies. Findings include no significant difference in the amount of posts by zoos mentioning small organizations as opposed to large conservation agencies. This is due to uncovering that zoos mention conservation agencies in posts less than 5% of the time. This study recommends zoos post about conservation work more frequently and that conservation organizations request this from their zoo partners. Furthermore, every zoo sampled mentions conservation and guest engagement in their mission statement.

KEYWORDS:

• Community
• conservation
• Facebook
• onehealth
• social media
• wildlife
• zoos

Acknowledgments

There are no competing interests or funding sources to declare.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2ZMU7Z.