We’re all addicted to our phones. In fact, you’re probably reading this on your phone right now. No, we didn’t hack your camera—we’re just making an educated guess. The exact figures around phone usage vary from study to study but they help us to get an idea of just how addicted we really are to our mobile devices.
One study placed the number of times that smartphone users check their device at 150 times a day. That might sound crazy but, for the average 16hours of waking time, that works out to approximately nine times an hour or every six to seven minutes. Considering how many text messages, emails, phone calls and push notifications the average person gets in a day, it’s easy to see how that “150” number came into being.
While we might tell ourselves—and, more importantly, our bosses—that we’re actually working every time we grab our device, we know that’s not exactly true. There are simply too many distractions on our phones. Even a Luddite would be powerless against the badge icons demanding immediate attention. Every time we reach for our phone, likelier than not, it’s with the intention of opening up one of our many social media applications and scrolling the hours away until lunchtime.
Canada has more than 30 million social media users with the overwhelming majority of those users concentrating their activity on image and video sharing-friendly sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. All of those captive eyeballs provide savvy retailers with an opportunity for free, targeted advertising. But to really leverage the power of social media and increase foot traffic within your stores takes more than just mastering the art of the hashtag and the gif.
Create Instagram Worthy Spaces
According to a study by The New York Times, nearly half (49%) of social media users share content because they want to inform others about a product or service that they like. A stunning majority (84%) share content because they care about the issue or cause at heart. Combine that information with an Ipsos report4 that broke down the types of media—i.e., written, image, video, graphic, etc.—that users are likeliest to share and a strategy becomes apparent. Approximately half of all shares on social media were images.
Creating an attractive and engaging retail space should go without saying but creating a space that people want to share on social media requires an added step. Take Toronto’s Calii Love, for example, that allowed street artist, Colette Miller, to paint an exterior wall of their business with her now-famous angel wing artwork. In doing so, Calii Love created an engaging space for customers to snap photographs to share on social media. By capitalizing on consumers’ innate “fear of missing out”, Calii Love created a social media trend of people posing in front of the angel wings. And, with more than 1,000 unique posts on Instagram alone under the hashtag #caliwings, the appeal worked. Two more successful examples and can be found in Orange County, California’s Morning Lavender Boutique and Café where they’ve built a flower wall that screams, “I’m your next Insta post!” and Los Angeles’ Showpo Café that built a small camera-ready nook within their establishment.
For these businesses, creating those simple photo-set-like spaces within their store or nearby it, they’ve managed to leverage social media user habits to create free advertising for their business and give would-be customers a good reason to stop by. As well as these businesses have done to capitalize on social media trends, there’s still room for improvement.
Retrofit & Redesign to Stay Relevant & Keep Trending
When it comes to trends and fads, social media is just like anything else—maybe even more so. Whether it’s a new dance, a new filter, a new kind of selfie, or some other kind of social contagion summarized in a meme-worthy gif or hashtag, everything on social media goes in and out of fashion—quickly. It’s easy to blame short attention spans for the “faddish” nature of social media content but there’s more to it than that. With the sheer volume of content available on social media, scrolling through dozens or even hundreds of posts and stories with the same angel wing artwork backdrop or flower wall set-up can get pretty tedious.
To continually engage audiences on social media, retailers need to regularly update their dedicated social media attraction. The thrill of seeing what you’ll do next and the fear of not wanting to be left out of the next social media trend can become a draw in and of itself.
The Reset Team is Here to Help
AdWeek summed up the effect of our smartphone and social media addicted world in 2018 when they wrote, “These days, if consumers can’t Instagram a store, it’s almost not even worth going.” As more and more of our lives get wrapped up online and in social media, having a physical space that is dedicated to creating virtual advertising is a must in order to boost foot traffic. With our experience in interior constructions, renovations, and retro-fits, The Reset Team is more than capable of helping you create your next Instagram-worthy display. Contact us today!
