A lot of work goes into a great social media presence, with plenty of Perth businesses doing a fantastic job of marketing their business online.
In the today's chapter of Great Perth Social, we dive into the social media channels of Perth furniture retailer Empire Homewares.
Bedroom setting by Empire Furniture
CONSISTENCY
In these blogs we’ll try not to repeat ourselves too much, buuuuuuuuut the consistency! While trying not to harp on about the same stuff, let's give the credit where it is due. Empire have benefited greatly from being reliably consistent in their post schedule. Generally speaking this looks to be a post every couple of days with a few extra now and again, around 4 to 5 a week. They do however, vary this a little and while that may sound contradictory, it isn’t (and also back off with your accusations).
As with anything, the more you put in the more you get out. If you are looking to grow your Instagram, you shouldn’t be surprised to discover you need to increase your Instagram activity. A scan through the Empire page shows they almost never missed a day to post in May, June and July 2017. I would hazard a guess this increased quantity (along with a possible increase activity in liking/follows/commenting) saw an increase in follows and engagement.
The point is that while consistency is important, you can make alterations in the service of goals. As mentioned in our post on Perth bar Jackrabbit Slims, a heavy hashtag list may be necessary to build an audience, but once your audience goals are met it can be a classy idea to shave this down a bit. Likewise in posting, if you are looking to pump up the numbers, make a plan to pump up the activity for a scheduled period of time. Once your goals are reached, you can scale this back to save work hours. Set the goals, set the schedule, and stick to it.
Clear goal orientated planning (and execution) is important in that it actually gives you usable and informative data. If you are consistent with your plans it means the data you get is more usable whether you succeed in reaching your goals or not. Remember, a failure can be beneficial if you learn from it. You cannot learn from your data if you are inconsistent.
STYLE
The stylistic choices made are also noteworthy. Tonally the pics have a through line that we can follow over a few months. While the consistency of tone is important, it isn’t a live by the sword/die by the sword situation. As with anything in business & marketing there is room to change and grow. If you scroll back through Empire’s page you will notice 3 distinct tonal changes.
Very early on you see a tone set:
Later on they move to a darker contrast with more white space:
And then there is the most recent earthy/busy tone:
These changes work and can be noticed as such because they remain consistent within themselves for a decent period of time. There is no overlap, no jumble, no random pics anywhere.
Empire do something with hashtags that I absolutely love. They set their own tag. Currently they run #ourworldofempire and earlier on they ran #myworldofempire. Not only does this tick the ‘consistency’ box that I obviously lose sleep over, but encouraging this kind of engagement with customers is also a great idea that can lead to potential benefits down the road. Don’t count on it to take off necessarily, but you gotta be in it to win it. #ugottabeinittowinit
THINK BROADLY(er)
Consider your content and its context. Empire sell homewares. More often than not this means the items are in a home, surrounded by other stuff. To reflect this, Empire have chosen to generally capture their product amongst other furniture pieces in the feel they see it. From my perspective this has three main benefits:
Firstly, this is a great way to avoid the catalogue look, or that creepy auditioning-for-a-TV-pilot vibe.
Secondly, it allows people to use their imagination as to what their rooms could look like.
Thirdly, you pack more of a punch with each post.
Have a scroll through a few posts of Empire. It isn’t super clear what piece they are promoting. This is fantastic because it entrenches the longer term goal of establishing the general idea that “EMPIRE HAS HEAPS OF SICK FURNITURE”. You don’t see a picture of and end table and go ‘oh yeh, love the end table imma go buy it’, rather when the time comes when you want to buy an end table, Empire pops into mind as a place that has “HEAPS OF SICK FURNITURE”. Even if they don’t have what you are looking for, you’ve been in the store and given them the best shot. Our job as marketers is to increase the number of people going in the door.
That's it from us today! Thanks for reading and we'll see you next time with more examples of great Perth business social media.
