Zoological collections have relied upon social media as a valuable platform to communicate their values and self-advertise to an interested public audience. Zoo visitation was prohibited during periods of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, resulting in social media becoming the primary avenue for zoos to connect with the public. Consequently, there has been much research offering technical insight to businesses about improving their social network marketing strategies through optimising post publication time, post media type and post character count. Similarly, there has also been some zoological research into the factors affecting which animal species are most popular online. However, these two areas of research have often remained mutually exclusive and there is limited guidance for how zoological collections can most effectively use social media to communicate values and promote visitation – something for which lockdown restrictions offered zoos a golden opportunity. This study aimed to provide a comprehensive review, specific to the zoological attraction industry, of which factors affect the public engagement with a social media post. The data were collected from the Facebook pages of 30 UK zoological attractions for 4 months from both 2019 and 2020. The results support much of the existing zoological literature surrounding social media, as well as highlighting novel predictors of social media engagement which offer alternative insight into how zoos can boost the popularity of their posts. In particular it was found that: identifying the photographed species within the post narrative; including photographs of forward-facing animals; featuring photographs of zookeepers and avoiding infographics were all ways in which zoos could maximise the engagement of their Facebook feed. These findings justify the need for a strategized approach towards social media communications and provide a wide-ranging breakdown linking different creative post variables to their effect upon levels of public engagement.