How to Build a Strong Social Media Presence for Your Furniture Store

Social media can drive sales and increase awareness of your furniture store. It’s a powerful tool, but only if used correctly. Before embarking on a social media marketing strategy, understand the opportunities and best practices. Here, you’ll find five actionable furniture store social media marketing tips to help you engage your followers and boost your social media presence.

1. Share Unique Content

What sets your furniture store apart from your competitors? Whether it’s the personalized shopping experience you offer every customer, rare furniture pieces you sell, or a wide selection, use that in your social media marketing efforts. Highlight what makes your store unique, and why customers should choose you over others.

To spotlight your customized shopping experience, share video testimonials or public reviews from your loyal customers. You might post photos of a beautifully made table, and talk about how you found the piece and added it to your selection. 

If you sell through certain furniture manufacturers, consider using one of their 3D online design tools to show a piece of furniture in various settings. Manufacturers like La-Z-Boy and Ashley Furniture have these tools available for the public to use and the images they produce can be very compelling to help a customer see a piece in different environments.

Above: image captured from Ashley Furniture’s 3D Room Designer featuring the Mallacar Coffee Table

Another idea is to share a video walk-through of your furniture store to show social media users your inventory. Anyone can shop online, but customers who value the in-store experience will appreciate that kind of content.

2. Use High-Quality Visuals

Whether you decide to post photos or videos, make sure they’re high quality. Show your merchandise looking its best. Grainy, pixelated photos with poor lighting miss important details of construction or upholstery and capture color inaccurately. Ultimately, low quality photos fail to attract buyers.

Think of your products from a customer’s perspective. What do they want to see when they’re thinking of purchasing a bed, a desk, or a couch? Consider what angles best showcase a product. Find ways to convey the scale of a furniture piece against other common home items.

Sharing visuals of your furniture pieces is practical; people can see if an item will actually fit in a space. However, social media users want to see how a piece will fit in their home aesthetically as well. The #homedecor hashtag on Instagram has nearly 70 million posts of home decor photos. Social media users want photos that will inspire them. Take advantage of that demand by sharing beautiful, bright photos and videos of your pieces. 

3. Post Useful Tips and Advice

Avoid limiting your furniture store social media marketing ideas to pretty visuals. You can also use your platform to advise your customers.

If you have a furniture piece that can be used for a variety of purposes, like a bookcase or side table, highlight its many uses in an informative post. You could share these ideas in a photo carousel on Instagram, in a series of photo tweets on Twitter, or in a photo collage on Facebook. Content like this is both inspiring and helpful to your audience. 

How to Build a Strong Social Media Presence for Your Furniture Store
Above: a sample post of a well conceived hashtag strategy and a great photo of details

You might also share how-to videos on assembling a popular item in your inventory or cleaning different types of furniture surfaces. Videos are a helpful format for these types of posts, but they also work as long-form text or checklists as well.

4. Engage with Your Audience

The unique content you create, the useful posts you share, and the beautiful visuals you post will only perform at their fullest potential when you engage with your audience. Ask meaningful questions. Like and reply to users who comment on your posts. Answer questions quickly and honestly. 

If a customer posts a photo of a piece they bought at your furniture store, like it and share it with their permission. Sharing user-generated content builds trust in your audience and can influence others’ purchasing decisions. 

Social media is a conversation. When you make an effort to engage with your followers, you make them feel good about your brand. That feeling can lead to loyal customers and sales in the future.

5. Tailor Content to Your Local Audience

Now that you have plenty of social media ideas for your furniture store, you should adjust your posts to speak to a local audience. One customer in one local community may have completely different needs, values, or hobbies than another customer. They may use different social media platforms, have a different income, or live in a different type of home. All of these factors will influence how they purchase furniture. Once you develop buyer personas within your target audience, you can refine your social media strategy and focus specific content toward those personas. Your salespeople tend to know their local customers well and they can often provide valuable insights into what those customers want.

Instead of creating, curating, and sharing content all day long, let an expert deploy that content for you. ThumbStopper works with retailers across industries to create a steady flow of distributed content. With ThumbStopper’s retail services, your furniture store can expect a growing customer base, increased social media followers, and higher store traffic. Get started with ThumbStopper and learn more about what we can do for your furniture store today.

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Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It's one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience - with your accessible, branded content - in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
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[/et_pb_row]
[/et_pb_column]

Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It’s one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience – with your accessible, branded content – in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
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