Q&A with Klooff Top Dog Alejandro Russo

Have you heard of Klooff – the social media company that lets pet owners share photos of their adorable animals? While they may not be a household name just yet, i’m sure you’ve noticed the popularity of pet photos on the internet.

Klooff are looking to tap into this much loved trend and become the world’s first pet lifestyle brand (after all, who doesn’t crack a smile at a lolcat?). It’s undoubtedly a lofty aim, but one they look more than capable of realising – indeed that was the impression I was left with after catching up with Klooff’s CEO, Alejandro Russo to ask him more about the company, his aspirations and their fantastic social media campaign (more on that later).

If you’re still scratching your head, Klooff calls itself as ‘a place where you can share your cat and dogs with the world…being themselves’, and Alejandro has described the outfit as ‘the internet in its purest form – nothing but pics and vids of cute animals’, but you can take a look and decide for yourselves over on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

1. For those not in the know, what is Klooff?
Klooff is making the world happier through hilarious pet photos. We’re a social media company that engages pet lovers through fun, easy-to-use iOS and Android apps.

2. Klooff have been cited as a ‘social media success story’, just how did you go about growing your Facebook community to 1.2 million in less than three month?
The key to our growth is quality content. Every day, we post amazing pet photos that generate high levels of engagement. These photos are quality user-generated photos taken by our community of passionate pet parents.

When we started growing our Facebook Page, we posted stock photos of cute or funny pets. Nothing happened. Then we started posting the best photos that our community took. This made our engagement levels increase dramatically. Then, we actually added a daily voting system to our apps to get the Top 10 photos of the day. We post these on Facebook and see great results.

3. Did you use paid media as part of your strategy?
We boosted our organic traction on Facebook with Facebook ads to test how we’d do. This is when we realized the power of having viral content. We started out with a suggested bid of $0.40-0.60/per Like, but we actually ended up paying $0.01-0.06, averaging $0.05 per Like, which is very low. We were able to get such a low price because every post we promoted was naturally boosted by the thousands of shares and Likes that the post received organically.

4. What did you learn from the campaign?
There two key lessons we learned from our campaign:

1) You can pay to increase your Likes, but if you don’t have quality content, you won’t get far.

2) Increasing Likes is a completely different game from increasing engagement. It’s obviously necessary to start by building an audience, but the hard work comes after that. The question you need to ask yourself is, ‘How do you keep these people entertained and interacting with your page?’

5. How did you measure the success of the campaign?
The campaign’s success was measured through both the total number of new Likes that we received and the cost per Like that we paid (the breakdown of paid, organic and viral Likes is key).

6. How do you keep your Facebook community engaged?
The most important component of managing a successful Facebook Page is keeping your community engaged. There are several tactics we employ to do this. Here are the most important ones:

1)     Post quality, shareable content.

2)     Post as little promotional material as possible.

3)     Be consistent and disciplined with how you post (times of the day, structure of post, targeting, etc.).

4)     Reward the active members of the community by Liking their comments and replying to their questions.

5)     Immediately delete spammers and offensive commenters.

7. What is Klooff’s approach to content and your content creation process?
We only post user-generated content from the Klooff community of passionate pet parents. We give them the space to upload all their pet photos and then our community does all the curation.

We have a two-step process where all photos get filtered and selected. First, our algorithms choose the photos with the highest engagement within a 24-hour timeframe. Then, these ‘nominees’ get put into our daily Top 10 voting system. This produces 10 winning photos which are 99% assured to be awesome.

8. What three trends do you expect to see in social over the coming 12 months?
Here are the main trends I see:

1)     ‘Mobile first’ will be an outdated term by the end of 2014. Most experiences will have to be designed as multi-platform experiences from the beginning. People expect to use the same services from any device, whether from their phones, tablets or desktops. Services as a whole will have to be conceived as multi-platform experiences, so the experience from every channel can maximise the value that specific platform provides

2)     Social media will be more than just sharing and connecting – it will also become a source of quality information, promotions and other person-specific targeting. We’ll be able to get great restaurant recommendations, job introductions and discount coupons, thanks to social information. Search engines will also become smarter thanks to social. Marketers will get a higher ROI on campaigns by utilising relevant social information when targeting customers.

3)     Everything will be social. There will be no divide anymore. I think most organisations will embrace social networks as a channel for both the inflow and outflow of relevant information. Companies will get relevant information from social networks and be able to offer even more relevant services thanks to the information these networks generate. I see this happening to even offline companies. Restaurants and other services will benefit from the social world, by getting access to valuable data being generated in the world around them.

9. What are your hopes for Klooff over the next 3 years?
In the next three years I see Klooff becoming the prime hub for pet-related internet activity. By growing into the most relevant community of pet owners in the world, we hope to become the world’s first pet lifestyle brand.

10. In your opinion which brands or organisation use Facebook effectively?
Branded Facebook Pages that I think do a great job are:

1)     Top Gear provides great roundups and weekly summaries, as well as a perfect combination of photo galleries, videos and text.

2)     Nike does a nice job curating and posting the best commercials, images and videos. It’s not easy when you have so much material to have such a high-quality page.

3)     Upworthy is fantastic at curating viral posts and being disciplined with page management (how frequently they post, post structure, etc.).

4)   Mashable has a good eye for content that will become a hit, and the curators do a nice job selecting titles and cover images for their posts.

I’d like to thank Alejandro for taking time out of his busy schedule as a start up CEO to share these fantastic insights and wish him, and Klooff all the very best for the future. If current form is anything to go by, I fully expect Klooff to go on and become the pet owner’s best friend online.