Justin Paxman, Director, Paxman Landscapes

Our horticultural industry needs to wake up to social media, says JUSTIN PAXMAN

When you visit a company’s website these days you should expect it to have links to an active Twitter account and Facebook page at the very least. If it doesn’t, even if it’s a subconscious act, you think it has fallen behind the times.

The horticulture industry doesn’t have a particularly modern image to begin with.  Ask Joe Public what they think a landscape gardener looks like and the reply will invariably involve the words wellies, flatcap or Titchmarsh.

Horticulture – more than just muddy wellies

But – and it’s a big BUT – horticultural businesses are enterprises that still require all the planning, foresight and use of modern Information Technology that you’d more traditionally associate with other industries.

Justin Paxman, Director of Paxman Landscapes, Huddersfield, believes the horticulture industry needs to wake up and enter the 21st century.  “It was quite an eye opener,” he remarked after speaking at the APL Networking Seminar in October 2013 and sharing his experiences of his company’s use of social media.  “At Paxman Landscapes, we’ve been using social media to great effect, but it was shocking to see the reaction of the majority of my peers who knew little about online marketing and the use of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and similar networking tools to market their organisations.”

Wake up to social media, Horticulture!

“If anything, traditional industries such as ours need to embrace new ways of attracting attention to ourselves even more than the rest,” he continued. “We have too many people in horticulture who are ‘heads down, arse up’ in their approach.  They do the job and hope everything else falls into place – but you just can’t plan for the future like that these days.”

“Running your own company and accounts as well as forecasting and planning for the future is different to being out there with a spade. That’s not to say people should introduce social media to their businesses just because I say so, or they think they should because others are,” Paxman added. “People need to establish where they want their businesses to go, who they want to speak to and then use the best online tools to make it happen”.

“We need a joined up approach in our sector and that’s where organisations like the British Association of Landscape Industries and the Association of Professional Landscapers could work together to hold seminars which educate horticulture workers on the benefits of and what can be achieved with the effective use of online marketing,” Paxman said.

Landscape gardening and horticulture is an industry that has fallen behind others.  In 1991, when they took gardening out of the national curriculum, the industry lost a lot of potential horticulturists to other industries and walks of life.  That shortfall of workers in the sector has resulted in the average age of people in this business being well over 40 years old.  The vast majority of people working in the industry are self-taught and a large proportion of horticulture graduates favour other avenues, such as landscape architecture.

Paxman’s call for organisations to work together and run workshops on how to use social media for the industry as a whole is remarkably fresh to the industry he believes needs to wake up.  “Companies need to fully understand how to progress their online marketing and social media strategies.  In horticulture, more than any other business area, those that don’t start to appeal to the general public with more modern methods will fall by the wayside,” Paxman concluded.

To find out more about Paxman’s Social Media Strategy, visit the company’s Youtube channel.

January 2014