Architect Amos Goldreich won Best Use of Social Media in the 2020 Archiboo Awards and is a judge for the category this year.
What’s your favourite social platform?
Instagram for inspiration and for nurturing contacts. We also use LinkedIn for raising our practice profile particularly in the property world.
You have 37,500 Instagram followers. What’s involved in reaching such an impressive number?
With social media it’s all about creating content and being consistent so there’s content on a weekly basis. The way we use Instagram is as a window into our practice – we concentrate on showing the process behind the projects. Every Thursday people have to upload at least two images with a caption and one link to an interesting article which I then share on LinkedIn. At the moment it’s mostly me keeping an eye on things and harassing people if they’re not producing content.
Do you employ an outside agency to help you?
I do have a mentor called Dave Sharp, who’s a digital marketing consultant. We’ve never met in the real world mostly because he’s thousands and thousands of miles away in Melbourne.
How much time does this all take?
Maybe five hours a week – I probably spend more – and that’s me personally. It can be time consuming producing the content and uploading it and the fact you need to be consistent. By that I mean posting every day. The rate of our followers drops when we’re not posting.
So it’s a viable way for you to find new business?
Over the past few years, there’s been a 40-50% increase in traffic to our website and that’s mainly due to social media and driven by Instagram.
We also get enquires through Instagram – they say ‘we follow you on Instagram’ or ‘we’ve seen your work on Instagram’ and we did convert one client in Cambridge recently.
Definitely the experience of the last 15 months has shown the power of social media. You can love it or hate it and you probably hate it a lot of the time, but it’s very powerful and our clients do spend a lot of time on it.
You are also using social media to advertise. Is this effective?
The scary bit with social media is the amount of information you can gather about your followers. This allows you to generate Instagram and Facebook ads which are really targeted according to age group, interests, location and so on and there are tools which allow you to see the engagement with these ads to test which work – which get the most traffic or click throughs – so you can see if you are getting a return on your investment. We spent around a £1000 on ads and this got us 15 projects. Our minimum fee is £25,000 so it’s a no-brainer.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learnt over the last 12 months?
Communication is key. I’ve started to send a video with our fee proposal and I have heard from clients they really enjoy them. It shows we are humans and as architects we don’t live in this ivory tower. It also saves time. Rather than sending a long email you just record a quick video explaining the brief and the fees.
Complete the sentence The only way to get your practice out there is…..
To take a chance and embrace the tools and mediums available. Dare to be different – the worse thing that can happen is it doesn’t work.
