Social media’s prevalence in modern society makes it an effective tool to help increase awareness and affecting social change. There are no boundaries as to where information can reach. Information from one end of the world can easily be passed on to the other end in just a split second. Seeing what others are doing on social media helps motivate behavioral change. Remember the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that went viral many years ago? The challenge started in Florida but thanks to the power of social media, the challenge was able to spread quickly and soon enough many people around the world started to participate in the challenge too.

Applying these ideas of social media in the conservation of less well-liked animals, social media can help to raise awareness of the importance of these animals and the different threats to their livelihood. This helps address the misconceptions that many people have of these animals and hopefully help prompt actions.

Click here to view the website of a society created by Simon Watt to promote the conservation of not-so-appealing animals! 🙂 

The use of celebrity endorsement and anthropomorphism can increase the success rates of social media campaigns aimed towards non-flagship animals. It could be because celebrity endorsements help increase people’s interest in these animals and the attribution of human-like qualities increases the sympathy people have of those unpopular animals. Therefore, it would be beneficial to have a celebrity endorse conservation programs and descriptions of these animals to be more anthropomorphized in an attempt to gather greater support from the public.