The Florida Snake ID Guide on our site is incredibly popular, and looking at the Google Analytics for this section of the site is like a weather report and holiday report. The better the weather, and the more free time people have, makes visits to the ID Guide goes up.
It makes sense. If there are more people outside doing yard work or walking in parks or hiking, there’s more chances of almost stepping on a snake. Which prompts the “Oh my lord, what WAS that?” response. Which leads people to our ID Guide.
Over the winter I started working on the Florida Frog Calls guide, and just recently I’ve seen that visits to this page seem to reflect the amount of rain we’ve gotten across the state. More rain equals active frogs. Not going to lie, even I’ve pulled out my phone while I’m sitting on my back porch because some frog I’m not familiar with started grunting from the creek.
And to kill two (completely metaphorical) birds with one stone, I popped in to Google to take a screen shot of the visit stats, and the page visits were spiking again. I tracked it down to a Facebook page sharing the frog calls guide. And that really brings me back to my own call, if I was a frog. “Social media. Social media.”
Social media is a powerful tool for outreach. You never know what is going to resonate with people, but if you think about what is relevant to peoples’ lives, you can provide some assistance, inspiration, or information that will help them. And if someone finds something of value, they’re likely to share it. Which is pretty much the whole goal of what we do here. Educate and inspire people to care about their natural world.
I’ll settle for tiny high-fives right now. Tiny froggy high-fives. (Because snakes can’t high-five.)