Around seven per cent of UK dogs are thought to have a Facebook page, standard.co.uk reports.
New research from Petplan has found that besotted owners anthropomorphise their pets so much that some even create Facebook pages for their pets.
This figure could also be set to grow further over the coming years, with the number of pet profiles appearing on social networks increasing by 36 per cent year-on-year.
Of all the dogs in the UK, seven per cent are thought to have their own Facebook pages, with the figure for cats dropping to four per cent.
Facebook (which has complained about what it calls “fake” users in the past) cannot complain too much though. It recently emerged that Boo – who is said to be the “world’s cutest dog” – was reported to be owned by a high-ranking Facebook executive. The dog has gone on to gather over give million likes on the site.
Celebrities have also been getting in on the action, with controversial designer Karl Lagerfield setting up a Twitter account for his cat – which has nearly 15,000 followers. The pet owners with accounts for their animals also regularly post social media content on their behalf, with 42 per cent uploading pictures and 37 per cent publishing status updates.
Speaking to itproportal.com about the results, Petplan’s social media executive, Francesca Keefe, explained: “We’ve long known that animals are the stars of the internet, but in the last year since we started tracking pets’ presence online there has been an explosion in ‘pet pride’.
“Increasingly, pet owners are giving their pets a more active role in their life and spreading the joy that having a pet can bring. We’re also seeing more and more pet owners take to Twitter as an effective way to look for lost pets.”