Technology: Social Media - May 2010

By Jessica Chevalier

If you’re looking for ways to promote your floorcovering retail business in a tough economic market, social media may be the missing piece to your marketing puzzle. Don’t be mistaken, social media isn’t only being used by teens and twenty-somethings; from 2009 to 2010, Facebook use by those ages 55 and over increased tenfold to more than 9.7 million. And 35 to 54 year-olds surpassed all other age groups to become the largest user population of the site. 

In fact, if you think about it, the core user of Facebook sounds remarkably similar to the typical flooring consumer. In 2008, the 35 to 54 age range held the greatest purchasing power in the U.S. and accounted for 40% of American household heads, according to Market Insights/Torcivia. Additionally, it’s common knowledge that most decisions on flooring are made by women, another Facebook majority. What do these statistics add up to for flooring retailers? Rather than waiting for the customer to walk into your showroom, Facebook and other social media sites provide an opportunity for you to meet the customer where they live. 

Chances are, if you’re reluctant to try social media as a promotional tool for your flooring retail store, you’re a harried business owner who feels there aren’t enough hours in the day to manage payroll, order inventory and keep up with industry trends, let alone sit at a computer and “make friends.” After all, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other forms of social media offer little in the way of concrete, quantifiable success, right? 

According to Nancy Giangeruso, president of Chateau Interiors and Design, which has locations in both California and Nevada, it all depends on how you define success. While some recession retailers think only about business that will bring them a dollar today, Giangeruso believes that the retailer needs to invest in activities that foster long-term business partnerships. She utilizes social media to build relationships that she hopes will pay off not only in one flooring sale but in a lifetime of sales. 

But social media offers tangible, numerical evidence of activity as well. Blog users, for instance, can sign up with a free service like Stat Counter, which tallies not only the number of views daily but also provides information regarding length of time spent, popular pages, returning versus new visitors, as well as location—country, city, state and URL—of viewers. And Stat Counter’s keyword analysis feature allows users to see what online searches brought viewers to their site so that they can cater online information toward the most popular topics. 

Similarly, Facebook provides a weekly page update for product/service page-holders that details the number of new fans, visits, comments and wall posts. And for Twitter, sites like Hootsuite offer an opportunity to see how many mentions your organization has received across the whole of the Tweeting universe and provide stats akin to Facebook’s. 

Combined with some old fashioned analysis of the information compiled, these tools give users the ability to see who’s looking and what got them interested, and to keep them engaged. They also provide a multitude of avenues through which a customer may reach a user’s website. What’s more, Internet search engines weigh both new content and popularity in determining their rankings; social media comments and customer reviews, therefore, help boost a business’s likelihood of coming up higher in online searches.

Better yet, social media tools provide users with an open line of communication to reach customers on a daily or even hourly basis. Jason Goldberg, owner of America’s Floor Source, which has locations in Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana, points out that for large purchases like flooring, the customer often goes online to gather information before hitting the pavement. A store that utilizes a blog, Facebook or Twitter to provide information that helps customers in navigating the market may become a trusted authority, which is certainly an advantage in a competitive market.

These online forums also provide another ethos-building opportunity. As fans comment, tweet and post, these spaces become easily accessible havens of customer recommendations and testimonials. Shannon Bilby of Creating Your Space, which offers custom web sites, search engine optimization and marketing for flooring retailers, refers to social media as “word of mouth on steroids.” No retailer would discount the value of a good client recommendation. How much more powerful, then, is a tool that creates a forum for recommendations and holds these as a permanent record for anyone who seeks it out? Within these locations, even a negative comment is often turned into a positive as fans seek to share good experiences in response to an unflattering post. 

Still, some individuals may feel that they prefer the old face-to-face style of doing business to the new technology-based variety, and, at present, that may be a viable choice. But Reva Revis, a public relations and communications professional with years of experience in the flooring industry, believes that participating in new technology won’t be optional for long. As business becomes increasingly entwined with social media and the customer relies on the technology more heavily for making decisions, those who abstain from participation will go the way of the mimeograph. She points to the use of Twitter as a navigational tool for trade show attendees as an indicator of how things will trend. If Mike’s Ceramic Suppliers tweets a 10% off sale to 1,000 followers at Coverings, chances are his promotion will have greater effect than Jim’s static printed sign at the booth next door. 

Revis emphasizes, however, that social media is not a full marketing communications strategy by any means. Traditional advertising must be employed in tandem if a business is to achieve its greatest success. The good news, though, is that social media requires both a minimal time commitment and a minimal financial investment. Chris Keale, owner of T&G Flooring in Denver, Colorado, estimates that he spends an average of ten minutes per day managing his business’s Facebook, Twitter and blog accounts. For those who are less savvy with technology, a commitment to social media will likely take more than Keale’s ten minutes. However, once the learning curve has been mastered, minimal daily input should yield solid results. Those who pay an outside firm to manage their social media, as Giangeruso does, will spend a few hundred dollars a month. 

In creating content for social sites, keep in mind that it’s not only acceptable but advisable to cover the same information across all forums. A blog piece about cleaning hardwood can be condensed to statement-form and tweeted with a link; the tweet can be posted as a Facebook status update. And, if the topic is particularly compelling to the consumer, a YouTube video demonstrating the cleaning process can be created, uploaded and embedded within the other sites. 

It is key to remember, however, that social media is a different type of advertising from traditional forms like magazine and television. Social media should never be used as a hard sell method. Tweets that announce “SALE! SALE! SALE!” are unwelcome in these forums that balance on the edge of personal and public space. Brad Millner, CEO of Big Bob’s in Yuma, Arizona, notes that customers who use social media don’t want to be sold—they want information. Millner believes that the retailers’ role within social media is simply to offer information and provide users the opportunity to buy if they choose.

Kevin Vogel of Carpets n More, a flooring contract and retail business with two locations in Las Vegas, Nevada and one in Denver, Colorado, began his journey into utilizing social media as a soft form of advertising by asking himself a question, “Why would anyone want to be a fan of a flooring company?” In spite of his uncertainty, Vogel established two separate social media platforms, one for each city, consisting of Facebook, Twitter and blog sites, and opted for pay per click advertising on Facebook to drive traffic to the company’s profiles. After 60 days, Vogel had doled out $3,500 for the advertising, and his sites had received a whopping 15.5 million impressions. Today, the Carpets n More Facebook pages have a combined total of over 1,100 fans.

Besides establishing a line of communication with customers, retailers use social media to drive customers to their websites and virtual showrooms, where they seek to accomplish specific tasks. Keale uses Twitter and Facebook to move customers towards his site, where he hopes to get them to subscribe to T&G’s mailing list. Keale estimates that he has a 50% chance of closing a sale if the customers provide this information. According to his in-store polling, the Internet ranks second only to word of mouth in how customers find T&G. 

Still, you may feel that social media adds up to more talk than transaction. Irene Williams, writer and communications expert in the flooring industry, acknowledges that social media may have experienced a perfect storm effect: its rise aligned with the economy’s fall, a time when people were seeking more advertising bang for the buck. But all signs indicate that, regardless of its speedy ascent to popularity, social media is unlikely to peak anytime soon. In mid March, Facebook surpassed Google as the most visited site on the web. While by no means a business silver bullet, social media offers flooring businesses an inexpensive means of disseminating its name and message to the buying public—a valuable tool in a tough economic time.

Copyright 2010 Floor Focus