Episode 13 (originally aired 1st March 23)

This week we took some time to hear about the many ways Precious Sparkle in Perth has changed and adapted through the years into the amazingly eclectic and diverse shop they are now. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me Dawn, I really appreciate it. You can listen to this week’s (and previous weeks’ episodes) here.
In our Social Media tips and Ticks section we look at the news that Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is trialling a new ‘Paid Verification Scheme’ in Australia which is aimed at businesses, organisations, and other official pages.

How might this impact your business or organisation if it comes to the UK? And what strategies can you implement to safeguard your ability to communicate with customers/ clients.
Finally, it’s World Book Day this week, so I’m putting out a call to Perthshire Authors to ask if they can tell us a bit about themselves, their books, and what they did for World Book Day.

I’ll be doing a Perthshire Author feature for next week’s PerthshireHour podcast. Please get in touch if you’d like to be involved.
This week the Twitter Live Space system was updated in some way so the Live Space barely worked. Sorry to those who tried to tune in. Hopefully, things will be back to normal again next week.

This Week’s Story

Precious Sparkle

This week we’re taking a step back into looking at Perthshire retail. We focussed on retail a lot back at Christmas so for the last few weeks I’ve been making an effort to talk about other organisations and businesses.

However, with the first signs of spring, it seems a good time to return to retail and see what new things are appearing in our area.

With this in mind, Dawn Fuge (which, she tells me, rhymes with Huge!) from Precious Sparkle in Perth, was good enough to take a few minutes to tell me about what’s new with them. On top of this, she also filled me in on a little of the shop’s story so far too.

The Story So Far…

Precious Sparkle launched in 2005 at Dawn’s home as an online store specialising in gemstone beads. Within three years (in 2008) the business had grown enough to move into a lovely office on George Street. Dawn then opened her first shop right next door to their current location in 2010. It was only one more move till they finally moved to their current location in 2017! As Dawn puts it; “It took me a while to get the location right!”
An ever-changing business

As you can tell, Precious Sparkle was quite a different shop originally than what we see today. They specialised in selling gemstone beads and jewellery as well as a toy shop called Theo & Tilly.

I asked Dawn about what prompted the change in location:

“In 2016 our second shop premises flooded and when we heard that the shop Pretty Things were planning to retire in this location we asked if we could take their premises.

In September 2017 we opened here opposite the Concert Hall and expanded what we did quite a lot! Now in addition to jewellery, scarves and bags we sell a gorgeous range of fashion, homewares and undoubtedly the largest selection of scented candles and reed diffusers in Perth!

We source products from all over the world and I regularly go to London and Paris on buying trips so there is always something new. Some people compare us to Anthropologie or Oliver Bonas which is always a compliment, but I like that we have things people have never seen before.”

I also asked if Dawn had a particular product that she would consider her personal favourite right now:

“We are all about sustainability and we love our eclectic slow fashion range. We pride ourselves on a personal service to our customers, helping them find fun, beautiful clothes that are effortless to wear and make them feel amazing, particularly people who might not enjoy shopping for clothes and find it difficult. We have Dutch, Danish and British brands that you just do not find everywhere!”

She also told me about one range of products that proved surprisingly popular with customers:

“Reading glasses! We put off stocking them for years but kept being asked so finally I found a brand from Spain that are super stylish and a bit funky and they have been really popular!”

From what Dawn told me about her shop there is clearly a huge range of items to explore in store. They stock items as varied as cushions and ceramics to shoes and handbags. Dawn even remarked that she thinks it can sometimes be hard to take everything in. As she put it:

“I always think you just need to spend a good amount of time looking and sometimes feeling the products to see the quality and uniqueness.”

I always like to hear interesting and unexpected stories about the businesses I talk to so I always ask about the most unusual customer requests they’ve had. Dawn had a good one:

“Over the years we have had a lot of different requests and we have frequently used them to expand in different directions. We’ve specially ordered furniture for people, and have made bespoke jewellery. But the strangest one was having to source hundreds of strands of pearls for a handmade chandelier that was put in the spa in the Dorchester Hotel in London!”

What’s new at Precious Sparkle?

With Spring around the corner, I asked Dawn what new and interesting lines she was looking forward to seeing in store:

“This season we are introducing a few new fashion brands including Dilli Grey which is bright and beautiful boho summer dresses and blouses and we have new jewellery lines including Les Cleias from Paris, amazing candles from Gold Moss (made in Inverness-shire!) and soon we will be receiving the 2023 collection of little porcelain giftware from East of India- always a favourite with our customers when they want a gift with meaning or sentiment.”

Social Media Tips and Tricks: That old ‘Paying for Facebook’ rumour might be true now!

For years we’ve seen odd posts go viral on Facebook with scaremongering grabs for likes and responses. Posts often take the form of ‘Facebook is going to cost £XXX per year, add a message below to petition Facebook to change its mind. It was always easily dismissed, until now…

Wait! So will I have to pay to use Facebook?

For now, no, you won’t have to pay for Facebook or Instagram but the truth might well be a little more cloudy going forward. At least for those with Facebook pages and/or more official Instagram accounts.

Sadly, there appears to be a growing wedge of truth to the old ‘paying for Facebook’ idea. Meta has recently announced an ‘Initial Test’ for a new service. This new service will be called ‘Meta Verified’ and it amounts to a very similar paid verification scheme to the one that is now the standard over on Twitter. (information for this part of the podcast came from this article from Social Media Today)

Basically, those with official pages (businesses, groups, etc.) on Facebook and Instagram will pay a fee which is currenlty described as between $11.99 and $14.99 (Australian). With this fee, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) will check your account over and ensure that you are who you say you are.

The range of services you recieve for this fee is a little hard to gauge. As one source puts it: “We’ll offer exclusive stickers on Facebook and Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels, and 100 free stars a month on Facebook so you can show your support for other creators.”

Personally, I’m not sure how much use this will be to a smaller page, or whether the verification will be worth that amount considering the man hours that ordinarily go into running a social page. Even if you have a staff member putting as little as an hour a week into your Facebook page, that amounts to paying in the region of £40 a month just for content.

It’s also hard to tell how choosing not to be verified might affect your page. Though it was always hard to quantify, there was a mild consensus that the harder push for Facebook adds/ boosted posts did at least seem to result in lower reach for posts that were not boosted. Will being unverified have a similar effect on visibility?

Is it even worth posting on Facebook any more?

A new report by Rival IQ looked at social platform performance between 2019 and now and the results are alarming yet not unexpected. You can get more details on the report in this Social Media Today article. However, the key information is that a high-ranking Facebook page in the retail industry might be lucky to see a 0.03% response rate on posts on their page. This means that a retail page with 30,000 likes is likely to only see 1 response to any particular post.

From my own experience, I would say that this number is more than a little pessimistic. In terms of the smaller-scale pages I see, the metrics are definitely better than this but the thing that does feel more in keeping with Rival IQ’s data is the rate of drop.

They recorded an industry average of 0.09% responses in 2019, 0.08% in 2020, but by 2022 that rate is recorded at 0.06%. In effect, they’re saying that responses are on a steady decline, and I have to agree with this.

Despite having some faithful page followers, many pages I know of now lack that boost they used to get from more passive users commenting, sharing, or simply liking their posts. Facebook is definitely showing a steadily diminishing return in regard to the effort needed to maintain a page.

Say you post once a day, and say that a staff member only takes ten minutes to make that post (a remarkably short time for a post). A week’s worth of posts will use an hour and ten minutes of their time, and even at minimum wage, that will cost you just over £10 a week. It’s getting harder to see the usefulness of taking the time if the responsiveness is set to drop even lower this year.

Add in the idea of paying a monthly fee to be ‘verified’ and I can’t see where the return on investment might be for a smaller business (or at least one that’s advertising products with a ticket price lower than the cost of creating the posts themselves).

So what’s the solution?

As I noted in the podcast, I don’t really have a single solution in mind. I suspect that the most inventive businesses will be the ones that do best as the social media sphere changes over the next year or so.

The main suggestion I mentioned was that it might be time to prepare a contingency plan for how your business might communicate with customers/ clients in the event that you choose to abandon your social media pages. Good, simple, first steps for this might include email, WhatsApp, and mass text message services.

Good old-fashioned E-mail?

Bolstering your mailing list is probably the easiest, and most similar to using Social Media. If you use an email management service like MailChimp you can add media, web links, and all sorts of other features. Each email you send out could act like a miniature web page/ blog post, offering rich user-centric content that’s catered to your target customer specifically (because it will only be seen by those of your customers who join your mailing list).

Build a smaller, more specific, community?

Alternatively, you might prefer to create a more niche community with an app like WhatsApp. WhatsApp allows you to create ‘groups’ which function a lot like a chat room in that everyone can share information and messages within the group. This isn’t ideal for some uses but it might be perfect if you offer a particular product or service that appeals to a loyal user base.

Send the message out in smaller bursts

One more option is to use a mass text messaging service. I’ve never used one of these myself so I’m wary of recommending a specific one here. However, there are many reputable companies out there that will manage a large database of customer mobile numbers and allow you to send a text to hundreds of people (or more) all at once.

These services normally charge, and there are also data security issues to consider. However, if managed well, this could be a nice replacement for (some of) your usual Facebook/ Twitter posts (e.g. offers, new stock, a new menu, and/or seasonal messages) and one that will create a notification in a customer’s pocket guaranteed. Just keep messages short, sweet, and infrequent. After all, you don’t want to go to all that effort only to have your list unsubscribe from texts in the first week.

Next Week’s PerthshireHour podcast

Next week I’ll be focussing on Perthshire Authors. It’s World Book Day this Thursday (2nd March) so I’d love to hear what they’ve all been doing with their Book Days, and how they’ve been interacting with their own reading communities.

If you are a Perthshire Author (or if you know a Perthshire Author) please get in touch and I’ll be sure to give you a mention on next week’s podcast.

Thanks for Reading

The number of listeners on the podcast is increasing at an amazing rate so I wanted to take a second to thank you all for helping build the PerthshireHour community back up. Every time you tell other people about the podcast, or subscribe using your favourite podcast apps, it helps build it up more and I really appreciate it.

If you’d like to be featured in a future podcast episode (it’s always free) or if you’d like to be part of the PerthshireHour WhatsApp group, please click this link to contact me directly.

Many thanks for listening in, and I’ll see you all next week,

All the best, John