The PawPost™ - a field guide to the post we invented.
Why social media needed a new format, and what a great one looks like.
When we sat down to design PetMeet, the first thing we threw out was the post. Every social network you have ever used inherited its post format from a platform that wasn't built for your dog. A rectangle. A caption. A like. A scroll. It was designed to be scanned, not savored.
Pets don't happen in rectangles. They happen in moments - small, specific, usually a little weird, and almost always better told with a picture and a couple of sentences that wouldn't make sense anywhere else. So we drew a new format. We called it the PawPost™.
What a PawPost is
A PawPost is three things: a photo, a short story, and a little metadata that only a pet owner would think to include.
- The photo: square-ish, but not a strict square - because sometimes the best angle is vertical, and we refused to crop a good sit.
- The story: one to three sentences. Enough room for a moment. Not enough room to overthink it.
- The tag: breed, age, and an optional quirk field where you can say things like 'barks at the fridge' or 'afraid of cucumbers.'
Why shape matters
People underrate the power of a format. But the format is what shapes what you'll make. Twitter's character limit invented a genre. Instagram's square invented another. A feed of vertical videos invented a third. Every time a social network has changed shape, the stories on it have changed shape too.
Our shape is small, kind, and specific. It isn't designed to be viral. It's designed to make a stranger pause and smile. That's the metric we care about.
How to write a great one
Great PawPosts are specific. 'Cute dog' is forgettable. 'Rye, moments before he realized the squirrel was behind him' is a PawPost. Name the thing. Name the moment. Don't perform.
Start with what you noticed. The specific tilt of the head. The small betrayal of the belly-up nap in your favorite laundry. The way she looks at you before thunder. These are the posts. These are the stories. This is the feed.
PawPost is a trademark of PETMEET LLC. We don't say that to be fussy. We say it because we want to protect what this word is going to mean.
End of story.
