PETA's goal is to get people to think about animals. Before disaster strikes, our objective is to prepare people to think of their animals in dire times in the hopes of educating everyone about the importance of keeping your dogs and cats safe — and never leaving animals behind. Before Hurricane Florence, we posted tips about how to prepare and how to help animals in need using shareable imagery and videos. The goal was to spread the word online as far as possible so animal companions remain in people's thoughts, even when they have many other issues to focus on. During Hurricane Florence, we showed the work we were doing to show people how animals can be seriously impacted. We hope by sharing the stories of animals in need that we'll inspire more people to be prepared for future disasters. When our emergency team went out during Hurricane Florence, the social team posted in real time about all of our life-saving animal rescue efforts.
With the Internet carefully watching the events unfolding during Hurricane Florence, PETA's rescue team went out in the field and began helping animals in desperate need who had been left behind. The social media team worked around the clock together in a newsroom style environment, getting raw content and creating shareable newsy videos, photos, and posts in real time. The goal was to get out as much content as possible and show as many people as possible what was happening. We also did so by contacting and tagging media and celebrities to further spread the word that PETA was there and ready to help more animals in need. Additionally, we posted calls for donations for people who were actively looking for ways to get involved.
Between all the PETA-created videos, people watched over a million times on Facebook, 750,000 times on Twitter, and many of the videos each surpassed 100k views on Instagram.
That doesn't even include the millions of views on our videos when posted by other accounts. A CBS video using our footage received more than 13 MILLION views on Facebook alone.
National and local media also retweeted and created their own videos using our content, which reached countless more people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpKBMqJ8d0M
https://twitter.com/KXAN_News/status/1042825864713568256
https://twitter.com/PA/status/1042817664161206273
