Click for cleaning tips

15th of December 2016
Click for cleaning tips

It seems quite simple, but exploiting the power of social media takes some elbow grease. ECJ correspondent Lotte Printz reports from Denmark.

Back in the 1950s – when television was not yet a household item and being a housewife was the most common occupation for women in Denmark – the Danish radio broadcaster offered housewives the advice needed to keep a sparkling home. From brass cleaning solutions to how to ace a spring cleaning.

In this day and age how-to advice lingers on. However, instead of being passed on like pearls of wisdom by mothers or grandmothers or even national broadcasters, we now seek cleaning advice online – where cleaning sector professionals can exploit the opportunities of social and other easily accessible media.

One cleaning professional in Denmark enjoying great success from offering this modern day version of pro tips is 36-year-old Louise Grønhøj who owns Basic Clean. She is too young to know how it was done in the old days, but her just over 44,000 Facebook likes and the two million views that her one-minute how-to videos have on YouTube tell her that she may be filling a gap.

“Especially young people who have just moved from their parents’ home do not know much about cleaning and ask fairly trite questions in my ‘Agony column’ on Facebook about, say, how to dissolve hard water spots which is common knowledge for my mother-in-law’s generation,” Grønhøj says.

Her videos that are posted through various media show anything from how to remove candle wax stains to mopping floors effectively are “a quick fix” for the users as she puts it.

“And for me it’s a hundred times more rewarding to post a video on a Thursday afternoon and see how many views it’s got in the evening than to sit in your car all day. I love helping people and think it’s better to fix or clean properly than buying new stuff all the time,” Louise Grønhøj continues.

When she quit her job as a salesperson selling cleaning agents to start her own business eight years ago, making videos for domestic cleaning was not part of the plan. She wanted to develop her own product line of cleaning agents and sell them business to business the “old-fashioned” way.

“But one day when on the road as usual I thought to myself that little seemed to come of it. Could I do something else? Spice up the business? It seemed so much easier sitting at home with a cup of tea making videos than cruising the roads day in and day out”, Grønhøj explains.

Making videos and selling her products in a web shop were her way of ‘escaping’ the roads. After eight years she still keeps her videos pretty simple, because she believes they are more authentic if they don’t look like something you’ll see on TV. But at the end of the day there is no easy way out, she points out.

“I now have eight employees, but the first four years were really tough and I could hardly make a living for myself at the beginning,” Grønhøj continues.

“The difficult part is to get all the likes and make various platforms intertwine.”

“Maybe that’s why the cleaning sector sees so many small companies that don’t last in the long run. They don’t really give it a shot. Even with the opportunities we have today, there’s no such thing as a passive income.”

 

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